David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero is awash with death and retribution, honour and compromise, despair and occupation, degradation and chaos. Set in the day after and the year after MacArthur’s conquest of Japan, the survivors of the war are attempting to force the strictures and structure of a now-defunct hierarchy onto the unstable world that has been left to them.  Peace’s narration vividly depicts Japan as a country under occupation by the authority of the American forces (nearly always called “Victors”). Attempting to build a society on decayed and bombed foundations, many Japanese have fled the consequences of their past actions, or are hiding behind false names, and the entire society shudders with the aftermath and consequences of the brutal war.

The plot is wrapped tenuously around the serial murders of young girls, unique not in their deaths but in the manner of their dying.  Each has been strangled, and raped, and left to decompose among the other bodies that scatter Japan.  Their identities are in question, and the police, led by Detective Minami, struggle to find any sort of evidence or suspects. Although the murders are based on an historical Japanese serial killer, the story that is told is not a clear-cut retelling of a particular horrific crime. The reader views the deaths and the investigation through all of the debris of the war and the hazy and frantic eyes of Minami.  Far from a stable narrator, Minami is a drug addict and under the control of a local crime lord; he struggles to face his past and seems complicit, in some ways, in the despair and destruction around him.  Under pressure by his superiors and tangled up in the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, Minami struggles to find the will, manpower, and time to investigate the steadily growing number of bodies.

The break in the case that leads to the killer happens early in the novel.  At that point, Minami’s task is to find the evidence that links the killer to additional murdered girls that have been found.  At this point, it becomes clear that the crime that is being investigated and the crimes of war and of occupation are all vying for Minami’s, and the reader’s, attention, and the book becomes less of a traditional mystery story and more of a meditation on what happens when chaos replaces order and  no one is who they say they are.

Peace’s writing style requires work on the part of the reader.  The narrative of the crimes is often interrupted with flashbacks to the war, digressions into the Occupation, or onomatopoetic chants that echo the noise and despair that consume the country.  Often, the deaths of the women and the investigation become lost in the general impossibility of life. As the story continues, Minami’s own life and narration become less distinct, and he sinks farther and farther into his recollections of the war and the destruction evident in its aftermath. Although the murderer has been caught, the crimes do not feel solved, nor the victims vindicated. In fact, the last chapters almost dissolve into a sort of despair that leaves Minami and the readers following him lost forever in the undergrowth and insanity of an occupied land.

This book is the first of a trilogy, and it bodes well for the complexity and depth of the books to follow that its ending leaves the reader in anticipation of what will happen next.  Minami, with all of his faults, is repeating the classic struggle of a man against the circumstances around him, and Japan itself fights to find its balance in the post-war world. The future of both is uncertain, but Peace’s work leaves the reader deeply interested in what is to follow.

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