The incessant ton-ton of jackhammers per- vading Tokyo clashes with the wa-wa of hungry children the displaced wander beneath “a low typhoid sky” while prostitutes beckon from shadowy doorways. But while Murakami’s fiction swoons with the cool rhythms of jazz, Peace recalls the feverish notes of a Bach fugue. Like Haruki Murakami, who has explored the effects of Japan’s wartime atrocities in such novels as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Peace makes clear that his tortured characters are merely reflections of a society consumed by its own aggressive impulses. I don’t have a heart any more,” Minami muses as he scampers through the ruins of Tokyo, more comfortable with mafia bosses than his own family, toiling under the aegis of law and order while struggling to restrain the demons of his own past. He’s pursued relentlessly by the grizzled Detective Minami, for whom police work provides an escape from the dislocation of postwar Japan. Loosely following the conventions of a detective procedural, Tokyo Year Zero takes root in the hunt for Kodaira Yoshio, a former soldier suspected of murdering 10 young women in Tokyo. In Tokyo Year Zero, the latest novel by David Peace, defeat effaces the order that had governed Japan for centuries, replacing it with a heavy-handed American authority that would remake the crestfallen nation in its own image. Empires rarely foresee their own downfall, and Japan’s surrender in World War II brought with it a period of shame that shattered the grand aspirations of an ancient regime.
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