New Tokyo Crime Title

[Mulboyne]

British author David Peace's new book Tokyo Year Zero has just been released in the UK. Peace has lived in Tokyo for around thirteen years but this the first book of his which uses a Japan setting. He won acclaim with a quartet of books set against he backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders in 1970s Britain and his style has been compared with that of American crime writer James Ellroy. Peace has said that he intends this new work to be part of a trilogy to cover the rise of Tokyo up to the 1964 Olympics: the story begins with the discovery of a body on the day the Emperor is due to broadcast his surrender speech. Peace is one of a number of recent successful British authors, including Mo Hayder, Susannah Jones and David Mitchell, who began writing while they were teaching in Japan. In his acknowledgements, Peace gives thanks to Mitchell as well as old hands hands like Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker and Mark Schreiber.

[Mulboyne]

Yomiuri: David Peace's novels draw on true crimes

Min, min, min, min, miin. As David Peace and I talk about the onomatopoeic Japanese phrases the British crime writer uses in his latest novel, "Tokyo Year Zero", it seems fitting that our conversation should be accompanied by the sound of cicadas outside his office in northeast Tokyo on a midsummer's day. "I'm trying to capture the sound," Peace says, when asked about his use of expressions such as "gari-gari" for the sound of scratching and the "chiku-taku" of clocks in his dramatization of the true story of Yoshio Kodaira, a Japanese serial killer responsible for the rape and murder of at least eight women in 1945 and 1946.

Described by GQ magazine as "British crime fiction's most exciting new voice in decades," Peace was also chosen as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young Novelists in 2003. Although the 40-year-old author didn't get his first novel published until 1999, his literary ambitions go back a little further. "I'd been interested in writing since I was about 8. When I was a kid, my favorite books were Sherlock Holmes books and Marvel and DC comics, and then I got into, for want of a better phrase, avant-garde fiction like [William S.] Burroughs, [Samuel] Beckett and J.G. Ballard," he says. But it was when he left his native West Yorkshire to enter higher education that he began pursuing his writing in earnest. "While I was at Manchester Poly I was writing this huge novel. When I graduated, I spent a year on the dole in Manchester finishing it, and every publisher in Britain rejected it," he says.

Unable to find work in recession-hit Britain, he ended up teaching English in Istanbul and didn't pick up a pen in anger again until he landed a job as a teacher in Japan in 1994. Even then, the scars from his previous encounter with the literary world still remained. "The experience of having that first novel rejected was very depressing, so I wrote "1974" [his first published novel] in exercise books just for myself. I honestly didn't really write [it]...with publication in mind," he says. But a visit by his father to Japan and a fortuitous downpour gave him a boost of confidence. "It really, really rained for two days so he read the book in the exercise books and said, 'You know, this is really all right so you should try and get it published.'"

So while his English-teaching colleagues studied Japanese or practiced karate before inviting students to listen and repeat, Peace worked on "1974" and "1977", which, along with "1980" and "1983", would become the Red Riding Quartet, a series of stories set in the north of England in the 1970s and early '80s. "1977"and "1980" focus on the notorious English serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, also known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981 for the murders of 13 women from 1975 to 1980. As a boy growing up in the White Rose county, Peace found the hunt for a mass murderer swirling around him, with 1977 a turning point.

"It was hot, and it was the [Queen's Silver] Jubilee. I'd been dimly aware of the case, but that was when the Yorkshire Ripper murdered the first so-called innocent girl, meaning a nonprostitute, and people began to really panic," he remembers. When Sutcliffe was arrested in early 1981, the teenage Peace was right in the thick of things. "He was brought to Dewsbury Magistrates [Court] so me and this guy bunked off school and stood outside the court all day and watched the media [who had gathered there to cover the case]...and this growing mob of punks with nooses, making signs [like] 'Hang him,' and at about 5:30 [p.m.] they brought him in. I remember being pushed, not to touch him, but you were swept along, and that had quite an impact on me," he says.

Peace meticulously researches all of his books, but how did he gather material for Tokyo Year Zero? "While I can speak Japanese to some degree and can read and write hiragana and katakana, I've got a very poor understanding of kanji and I was worried that, while there were English-language newspapers at that time, and they're all available in the [National Diet] Library, the real details I needed, the kind of things to really bring it to life, would be written in the Japanese newspapers," he says. Help came in the shape of Shunichiro Nagashima, a young editor at his Japanese publisher, who offered to translate any relevant articles on the case, leaving Peace to focus on English-language material. "I went through the English-language newspapers for the whole of '45 and '46 and took copious notes. I read all the nonfiction that was available, like Embracing Defeat by John Dower. "I also read in English a lot of Dazai Osamu novels that were set during or after the war because there are really fantastic little details," he says.

Set in post-World War II Japan, Tokyo Year Zero is the first part of The Tokyo Trilogy, which will focus on three crimes from that time. "The Kodaira case, which is actually now forgotten by most Japanese people, the Teigin Bank case, which everyone knows about, and the death of the head of the Japanese National Railways, [Sadanori] Shimoyama," he says. So 13 years after flying into Narita Airport, what prompted him to write about his adopted home? "Initially all I was interested in was writing books set in Yorkshire, but at the same time I did develop a fascination with Tokyo--I would never say I was that interested in Japan, it was always more Tokyo--and very early on I read a book called Tokyo Rising by Edward Seidensticker, about Tokyo since the Great Earthquake [of 1923], and in that book there's a very brief mention of two bodies being found in 1946 in the place where Tokyo Tower is now. "A year later a book came out called Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan by Mark Schreiber, and in that book there is a chapter on the Kodaira case."

It was not only the killings that fascinated Peace, but also the time they took place. "The reason I picked this case is that I've got two children, and their mother is Japanese, and they go to school in Japan. I just felt that the history on both sides didn't seem to match what had actually happened, whether you were a victor or a loser. "I really wanted to show what it was like to be defeated. I think it's a book about defeat. We're not all successful, but I think we've all, at some point, been defeated," he says. And Peace makes no apologies for the grim picture he paints in Tokyo Year Zero. "It's not that I wake up in the morning and say, 'I'm going to write some grim stuff today,' but I'm drawn to it," he says.

In Tokyo Year Zero the capital is a bleak world where confusion reigns hand-in-hand with the occupying "Victors," and "no one is who they seem to be"--a recurring phrase that Peace uses to convey the blurring of identities that resulted from postwar political purges. "The purges were not for things like killing Koreans willy-nilly, they were for things like being members of the kendo club. So someone would retire and [a colleague] would take his name, not only in the police but any kind of government ministry. "People are adopting identities and changing their names all the time, so quite literally no one was who they seemed to be," he explained as he topped up my glass of oolong tea. Toku-toku. Toku-toku. "The narrator is not who he seems to be but then again, without getting too arty-farty about it, I don't think any of us are who we seem to be," he adds.

As for modern Tokyo, Peace thinks the city should be proud of its enviably low crime rate even though, as the father of two young children, he has some reservations. "I've always found Tokyo to be much safer than any English city by a long way...My son can go and play in the park, whereas I don't think I'd let him if he was in England. "Having said that, I still wouldn't let my daughter go and play in the park. I do worry about her growing up in Japan. I mean, I think that whether you're foreign or Japanese, it's a country geared to men," he says, reinforcing his point by tapping the desk ominously. Ton-ton. Ton-ton. Ton-ton.

[Mulboyne]

The Japanese translation is out quite quickly. Presumably with "Memoirs of a Geisha" in mind, one reviewer urgers readers not to be put off by the fact it's a book about Japan, with Japanese characters but written by a foreigner. He says it has the chill factor of a work like Ugestu Monogatari and the tone of the Kurosawa film Stray Dog.

[omae mona]

Mulboyne - thanks for bumping this thread. You solved a mystery for me. At a restaurant on Wednesday I was engaged in conversation but had a very hard time *not* overhearing parts the conversation at the table next to me (since it was in English and the restaurant was mostly empty). It was an English guy talking to another fellow about his writing, getting complained to about writing in the voice of a Japanese person, and about a lecture he was about give (possibly this?).

I was racking my brains trying to figure out who it was, since the story sounded familiar. Your post reminded me! Google image search confirms that it was indeed David Peace (wearing glasses). I am not sure what he ate, though.

[Mulboyne]

Japan Times: Peace follows turbulent times

..."Tokyo Year Zero," published last year and now available here in paperback in English or Japanese, impressed The New York Times Book Review so much that they mentioned Peace in the same breath as Fyodor Dostoevski, William Burroughs and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Hallowed company indeed, although there's nothing hallowed about the novel's subject matter: It follows pill-popping protagonist Detective Minami's pursuit of the real-life sex killer Yoshio Kodaira, who raped and murdered at least eight women between 1945 and 1946. "Tokyo Year Zero" is the first in a planned trilogy of historical crime novels set in Tokyo during the Allied Occupation, where "a long-dead fish is a whole week's wage" and corrupt police make calls at the shabby apartments of "hostesses and mistresses . . . balladeers and gangsters." Peace is currently "halfway" through the next novel in the trilogy. "Tokyo Occupied City" is about the Teigin Incident of Jan. 26, 1948, in which a man passing himself off as a health official convinced 16 people at a Tokyo bank to drink a poisonous liquid he said was a remedy for dysentery, killing 12 of them. The final installment, "Tokyo Resurrected," should examine the Shimoyama Incident of 1949, in which the president of the Japanese National Railways was found dead on train tracks, apparently struck by one his company's own trains...

...One expat commentator hailed "Tokyo Year Zero" as "the best novel in English about Japan." What reaction did the Japanese translation get here?

The Japanese press would ask — and they mean this is a compliment — "How could you get inside the Japanese mind?" As if there is only one Japanese mind. I always find this a very strange concept. Even liberal, well-educated journalists and friends of mine who are Japanese will say, "It's amazing how you could write as a Japanese." The government and media perpetrate this myth of one Japanese mind, as if everyone's got f**king ESP or something. And yet there's 120 million people in this country, and I've been here 14 years and every single person I've met has been a unique individual. So as I was writing, I wasn't really thinking, "Is this what a Japanese person would do?" I was just thinking, "Is this what this character would do?"

Did you set out to try to write the Big Postwar Japan Novel?

I don't even think, "It's going to be a crime novel." It is what it is. I would never set myself up in competition. I think that's really dangerous. Basically, I write the books for me. That sounds either selfish or arrogant, but it's just because I think it's more arrogant to presume there will be readers. As long as I think it's all right, then I'm to some degree satisfied. One of the things I was really surprised at was how positive people (expats) have been in Tokyo about that book. When anyone's ever written a book on Tokyo, foreigners — myself included — have thought, "That's just not right." I've read books and thought, "That's ridiculous." Often these books are only written by people who make flying visits anyway, but I think anyone who lives in a foreign country, there's some reason why they're not living in their own country. Of course, to a great degree we can reinvent ourselves in a way that's not possible in your own country, and you construct your own version of Tokyo, and the minute you read something that contradicts it, you get upset, you get kind of threatened by it. I think this is why foreigners ignore each other on the trains (laughs). It wasn't an attempt to write the Great Tokyo Novel, but it was certainly an attempt to avoid writing a bad Tokyo novel. That was why my Japanese editor was so helpful, because I didn't want to have anything that was incongruous, a mistake...more...