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Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) (Hardcover)

by David Peace (Editor)
2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
RRP: £16.99
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Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) + Occupied City (Tokyo Trilogy 2) + GB84
Price For All Three: £23.10

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber; First Edition edition (2 Aug 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571236456
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571236459
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.2 x 4.1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 187,243 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Tokyo Year Zero is further proof that David Peace is now one of the most ambitious and accomplished novelists of the modern era -- in any genre. He has always been an innovator, forging a striking synthesis between Noir crime writing and Yorkshire realism. Nineteen Seventy-Four was a visceral and atmospheric novel set in the year of the Silver Jubilee, with the Yorkshire Ripper at his sanguinary work. This book was the second of the Riding Quartet, and demonstrated what readers had come to expect -- a totally individual voice, with the characters (such as past-his-best journalist Jack Whitehead) memorably drawn.

Tokyo Year Zero, Peace's new novel, is another adroit synthesis, this time between the sprawling historical novel and the gritty crime genre. The author's picture of a city at war (the year is 1946) rivals that of any modern novelist in vividness and authenticity. It is one year on from the surrender, and Tokyo is struggling to maintain its pride after the American victory that destroyed its imperialist ambitions. The police force barely functions, and a variety of unpleasant individuals struggle for supremacy in Tokyo's thriving black market. Peace's protagonist, Detective Minami, is assigned a difficult case: the bodies of two women are found in Sheba Park, but as he begins to dig beneath the surface of an increasingly baffling and complex mystery, Minami finds (to his dismay) that his personal past -- and personal secrets -- are somehow involved with the murderer and his savage killings.

This first book in the Tokyo trilogy is as surprising and idiosyncratic an offering as we have come to expect from David Peace, and it's a safe bet that readers will be impatient for the remaining books in the sequence. --Barry Forshaw



Review

'A searing piece, the narration taut, the prose spare and uncompromising ... the bleakness of the times is beautifully captured.'
--Sunday Telegraph --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews

23 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
2.9 out of 5 stars (23 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning, 19 Jan 2009
This review is from: Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) (Paperback)
God, I'm baffled by all the negative reaction to this novel. I thought it was just the most stunning, visceral, haunting and hallucinatory book I've ever read. Peace's style risks teetering into self-parody, but in my view he avoids it here - and the result of that risk-taking is to put you right inside the mind, the body, the soul of Detective Minami, to make you breathe the foul air of postwar Tokyo, to make you ache for his poor wife and children, and to dream his recurring nightmares.

It's exhausting, and it's far from easy or light-hearted, but please please please if it sounds like your kind of thing, don't let the low average rating on here put you off. It's Peace at his best - and that's saying something.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Get off Your Knees!, 26 Feb 2009
This review is from: Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) (Paperback)
****Minor Spoiler********

I can understand the criticism of this book. The repetition can get a bit much, the story isn't signposted, it's hard work etc. In fact i think i enjoyed the book a lot more once i'd read it and ruminated on it. I don't agree with the pretenious guff about how it's a meditation on how a nation's violent trauma causes individuals to suffer from multiple personality disorder or any of that. It plays like a pretty straight noir, with the caveat that the narrator has assumed a new identity after a war. I liked it a lot, but i loved GB84, the Red Riding Quartet a LOT more.
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21 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment, 6 April 2008
By Mister Hobgoblin (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
Tokyo Year Zero was a disappointment.

I have admired David Peace for some time. He has a very distinctive style, using repetition, mantra and leitmotiv to generate a claustrophobic and compelling interior monologue. He has focused in the past on Yorkshire icons of the 1970s and 1980s - the Yorkshire Ripper investigations, the Miners' Strike, and Brian Clough.

Tokyo Year Zero sees a major change of scene - Japan in 1946. Tokyo lies in ruins and a serial killer stalks the streets. In the context of a nation reeling from the utter annihilation of two entire cities, with bodies piled up in mounds, the concept of investigating murder is rather surreal. And as ever, Peace focuses on the investigators and their office politics, sleaze and decay rather than on unveiling the identity of the killer. In Tokyo Year Zero, the killer is identified early, and the challenge for the investigation is to find evidence to link him to various victims.

In theory, this should work well. There is enough to make this novel, in theory at least, differ from his previous works. In particular, the absence of personal greed; the sense of defeated honour; the obedience - should all work into giving Tokyo Year Zero something new to say. Yet it doesn't quite work.

Firstly, the repetition and mantra are done to death - to the point that they become really irksome and boring. Peace has an interesting trick of making blocks of text pare down into triangular shapes - a bit like the blade of a guillotine. But this trick, too, is done to death. The plot itself is confusing, particularly at the end, which seems to use confusion as a metaphor for insanity. But it is hardly satisfying for a longish novel to splinter in this way at the end. One of the attractions of [most of] Peace's previous novels was that the end was known from the outset (the Yorkshire Riper was caught; the miners lost; Brian Clough got sacked), and the beauty was in working slowly, inevitably towards that conclusion. That is not the case here, so the confusing end cannot even fall back on a wider public knowledge of events. And the confusing plot doesn't help itself with a cast of many, many people - all with Japanese names that are unfamiliar to an anglophone ear - and which therefore tend to blur into one.

Tokyo Year Zero feels too formulaic - as though Peace has heard praise for his technical brilliance and decided to play to this perceived strength - when in fact his real strength was injecting his work with the lifeblood and soul of his own experience. This is the first of a trilogy of Japanese novels - I hope the others see David Peace back to his brilliant best.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Having some points of reference help.
Loved this book, living in Tokyo helped with some of the geography and references, but saying that coming from Leeds also helped enjoy his other works. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Matthew Robin Best

1.0 out of 5 stars Style over substance
It's one thing for a writer to have a distinctive style but it's another thing when a writer allows style to get in the way of telling the story. Read more
Published 8 months ago by N. Morton

3.0 out of 5 stars Quirkily effective, yet no masterpiece
*** Contains very slight plot spoilers ***

I had been intending to tackle David Peace first through GB84, but this came my way beforehand so was my rather impromptu... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Mr. A. D. Maddox

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern Japan's pre-history
A fantastic original work that contains real substance in defining the nadir of a nation's history before its renaissance. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Truth Seeker

1.0 out of 5 stars Want a good reason to commit seppuku?
Hey, great a murder mystery set in the post WWII apocalyptic landscape of Tokyo. Imagine a cast of engaging characters struggling to get by under the occupation, and also a... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Caterkiller

1.0 out of 5 stars Interesting style, very poor story
As mentioned in some of the other reviews, the style Peace is using makes it an interesting and sometimes onerous read. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Adam Smith

2.0 out of 5 stars Painful
I finished this just last night, and by the time I staggered to its nebulous conclusion, I was about ready to tear my own eyeballs out. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Adam K.

4.0 out of 5 stars not easy
To like this novel you have to have read some fairly experimental literature.. it's not linear, it's not simple.. Read more
Published 11 months ago by 2cleverbyhalf

1.0 out of 5 stars Pass
This is my first David Peace, and it'll be my last. Great idea and setting with a good story in there trying to get out, but drowning in 'literary style'. Read more
Published 11 months ago by GRZ_Scot

4.0 out of 5 stars Bleak thrill in post war Tokyo
I really enjoyed Damned UTD and looked forward to reading this first book in his envisaged Tokyo trilogy. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Gerry McCaffrey

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