Tokyo Year Zero

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace is the first in a three-part series based in post-war Japan. I initially heard about the book through our fourth-year English teacher, who, like me, is a big fan of war literature. We were given a list of books that would be acceptable for our next year of study, and Tokyo Year Zero was included on that list. At the time, I chose another book to study, but bought Tokyo Year Zero as a book to read at leisure. When I bought it, my teacher had told me I would not be disappointed. How right he was.

Tokyo Year Zero is set in a war-ravaged Tokyo, struggling to work through the trials and tribulations that World War II brought to the once-great city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have just been bombed, and our narrator, Detective Minami with the Tokyo Police Department is investigating the murders of several girls. Each girl has been strangled, raped and brutally murdered, and it seems virtually impossible to identify the bodies awash the many missing people. However, in viewing the crimes through Minami’s eyes, we also find out about his own struggles, including a drug addiction and pressure from his superiors. Minami must face these demons as he attempts to find evidence that will link a suspect to cries that have shaken the inhabitants of the city.

The story is actually based loosely upon the story of a relatively famous Japanese serial killer, but Peace has taken the case, and made it his own. His writing is crude, and sometimes almost childlike, which works well to show the narrator’s way of thinking. He uses a lot of unusual techniques in his writing, none more effective than his constant use of onomatopoeia to describe the sounds, sights and feelings of Minami as he travels through the shell that used to be his city. The characterisation of Minami himself is excellent. He is not the typical cop; he breaks more rules than he keeps, and his thoughts aren’t organised at all. It can be quite difficult to keep up at first, but within a few pages, I was already falling into his mind-set, noticing the little quirks and vices that Peace has written into Minami’s character. In places, both the war and the crime seem to be forgotten, more than a few of the chapters deal solely with Minami and his issues, making for a more interesting read than some other novels I have read. Minami’s character is one of the things that kept me hooked throughout, and even to the very end, the reader stills knows very little about him.

Dealing with more mature themes than I thought would be included on a list of books intended for fifteen-to-sixteen-year-old schoolchildren was something that I found slightly strange, but I’m thrilled that my teacher decided to include it. Tokyo Year Zero is a gripping read that deals with more than just the soldiers of the wars. It deals with the people in the country, fighting to keep their city from being completely overthrown by the ghosts of World War II. I would recommend this book to anyone with a love of war fiction, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series someday.