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Speaker: David Peace
Topic: Tokyo Year Zero
When: Starting at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, 4 November 2007
Admission: Buy a copy of Tokyo Year Zero from Good Day Books David Peace was born and brought up in Yorkshire. From 1988 to 1991, he attended Manchester Polytechnic, which awarded him a BA in English in 1991. He taught English in Istanbul from 1992 to1993 and then moved to Tokyo, where he has lived ever since. His earliest novels were set in Yorkshire of the 1970s and 1980s, the place and time of his youth. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet, comprising Nineteen Seventy Four, Nineteen Seventy Seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty Three, as well as GB84, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. His highly acclaimed fictional portrait of footballer Brian Clough, The Damned Utd (2006), was described by The Times as "probably the best book ever written about sport." Tokyo Year Zero is the first novel of a planned trilogy set in Tokyo.
Well-known author Hillel Wright, who reviewed Tokyo Year Zero in Metropolis, said this about the book.
Repetition is a valid, often valuable technique in literature. The problem with Tokyo Year Zero, by British-
born, Tokyo-based crime writer David Peace, is whether the author's consistent repetition of a few key
phrases serves to intensify the reader's identification with the protagonist-narrator, Inspector Minami, or
to irritate the reader to the point of skimming rather than reading or, worse, giving up altogether.
Peace, to be sure has good reason to employ this tactic. Setting the novel in Tokyo on 15 August 1945 (the day of Japan's surrender to end World War II) and on the same day one year later, the author hopes to establish and portray Minami's deteriorating health and state of mind as he investigates the apparent serial rape and murder of several teenagers. To complicate matters, both the suspect and the investigat-
ing detectives share a dark and guilty past, having committed atrocities when they were military police in China early in the war.
Minami hunts for clues ina hungry, bombed-out city, in the heat and humidity of high summer, in pesti-
lent nighttime alleys haunted by young prostitutes: "'Asobu ...? Asobu ...? Asobu ...?' I itch. I scratch. Gari-gari. I itch. I scratch. Gari-gari. I itch. I scratch. Gari-gari."
Minami's home life includes a starving wife and two sick children, one of whom is going blind from the
DDT that was sprayed on her to kill lice. His investigation team includes at least two rogue cops, one of
them paid by his bosses to kill him. For his drug habit (downers), he owes his soul to the local yakuza
kingpin. And the backdrop to all of this is the never-ending din of hammering-"Ton-ton. Ton-ton. Ton-ton.
Ton-ton."- as Tokyo incessantly rebuilds amid the rubble.
Minami might be described as Andrew Vachss' renegade vigilante Burke meets Albert Camus' existential antihero Meursault. Burke, like Minami, inhabits a world of child molesters and sex offenders, a world
where the ends (grim and gritty justice) justify the means (violence and brutality). The French novelist's
protagonist shares with Minami a consciuosness largely blotted out by extreme and relentless circum-
stances - natural, social, and historical.
Your ticket for admission to David Peace's presentation will be a copy of Tokyo Year Zero, bought from Good Day Books. Hardcover copies of Tokyo Year Zero may be purchased at Good Day Books for four thousand thirty two yen (¥4032) each, tax included.
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