Fiction:David Peace is contemporary literature's most compelling chronicler of defeat. In a series of corrosively affecting novels, he has examined the interiors of various English traumas, from the Yorkshire Ripper case (The Red Riding Quartet) to the miners' strike (GB84) to Brian Clough's stint as manager of Leeds (The Damned United), writes Keith Ridgway.
As a body of work, it has a distinctive style - a kind of reportage-of- consciousness - and a steady layering of detail. It feels organic, permeated by its subjects, oozing masculinity and fear. You can smell a David Peace novel. Tokyo Year Zero stinks. It's a remarkable book.
The prologue takes place on the day of surrender in August 1945, as a destroyed city prepares for and absorbs the shock of emperor Hirohito's broadcast to the nation, confirming surrender. The body of a young woman has been discovered, and Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Minami and his colleagues are at the scene. The case is closed in no time at all, blame and punishment meted out to an old Korean man who happens to be nearby. The brutality and the sense of collapse are immediate.
THE NARRATIVE PROPER opens a year later with the discovery of two more women's bodies in Shiba Park. We follow the course of the investigation, and the manner of it, and are submerged in the misery of a defeated people, a defeated city and a defeated country. Everything is rubble, including the population. Tokyo is in ruins. There are no communications. The police have no cars, no guns. Trains, when they run, are packed tight with a shocked human cargo. And that cargo in turn carries its own - ringworm, lice, sickness, hunger, filth, humiliation. It is a stifling August, and Detective Minami's desperation, paranoia and helplessness are rank, as is his relentless, inch by tortuous inch, forward movement. He narrates the story, and Peace has found for him a remarkable voice - a voice from the rubble, filled with a jagged, chopped-up momentum, haltered by despair and doubt, but always with a kind of broad, startling poetry. Peace is a master of repetition, knowing always when, and how much. Words, phrases, even paragraphs are repeated. Minami's constant itching, scratching, the endless hammering in the background, the calls of prostitutes in the wrecked alleys, and much more, combine to form an incantatory percussion, a rat-a-tat-tat that marches the reader along at bayonet point.
Identifying the murdered rather than the murderer soon becomes the focus of the investigation, and identity is a bigger puzzle here. This is an occupied city. And the Americans are conducting various purges among the survivors. As a result, the police force seems full of people who a year previously went by a different name. No one is necessarily who they say they are. Add to this a gang war over the city's markets, and Minami's deeply uneasy relationship with one of the market bosses, as well as the spectre of the original body, which obviously should form part of this investigation but which nobody seems to want to mention, and there is a sufficient tangle of plot to keep us guessing.
But the engine of this book is Peace's depiction of Tokyo and its people, through the frangible and furious voice of Minami, who seems at times to carry Tokyo on his back. An addict, an adulterer, a killer; he is sometimes slow, stupid and weak - but he is complete, not just as a point of access for us, but as an utterly convincing man of his time and place.
THERE WAS A danger that when Peace left the familiar setting of the north of England, and the familiar grubbiness of the 1970s and 1980s, he would lose some of his gift for authenticity. And that in choosing a historical setting as specific, desperate and abject as Tokyo in 1946, his grim meticulousness might not be up to the task, or his prose might seem to parody itself. Although there are some English tics that Peace has taken with him (people are never "standing", for example, they are "stood"), nothing is diminished. Peace is as convincing here as he was back in the bleak, macho grime of Leeds in 1973 or on the Yorkshire pickets of 1984. Once again, his fiction is based on fact - not just the facts of post-war Tokyo, but the facts of this murderer as well - and once again he has created a fiction that leads us far closer to the truth than you feel we could ever otherwise get. The instinctive politeness and the underlying rage, the battered deference of a society reeling from violent catastrophe, the impossible balance of obligation - all are beautifully drawn.
Tokyo Year Zero is a story about the agony of survival and the choices a society makes in order to survive. It engages all the senses, in ways that should be impossible.
Keith Ridgway's most recent novel is Animals, now out in paperback from Harper Perennial
Tokyo Year Zero, By David Peace, Faber & Faber, 344pp. £16.99