TOKYO YEAR ZERO

A Tokyo policeman tries to sort out a series of murders one year after the surrender to the Americans.

Peace (GB84, 2004, etc.) sets his latest in Japan 1946. The country’s pseudo-emperor is Douglas MacArthur, an invisible figure whose subjects slog away in the ruins of their cities, trying to rebuild a civilization. In a place with no running water, Detective Minami, persistent, lice-ridden and drug-addicted, is attempting to solve a string of strangulations. The victims are all young women, possibly prostitutes, and the detective work must be done in the most chaotic conditions: The city is choked with rubble, the markets are controlled by criminals and the police force is crippled by corruption. Minami has other problems as well. He’s haunted by his complicity in the crimes of the late Chinese occupation, beholden to one of the crime lords for money and drugs and unable to resist the charms of his mistress while his family is close to starvation. This relentlessly bleak police procedural unfolds amidst the endless background noise of hammers and the maddened thoughts of Minami, who is coming to understand that his superiors, men with questionable pasts, want him to fail in his investigation and may even want him dead. The investigation comes to a head when Minami and a possibly treacherous colleague are sent out of Tokyo to the small hometown of the murderer.

The Japanese-ness Peace layers on may be overwhelming for some readers—there is, for example, no equivalent for the constant stream of apologies out of everyone’s mouth—and the psychosis is tough going, but crime readers may fancy the change of scenery.