TOKYO YEAR ZERO
By David Peace
The Golden or Classic Age of Hollywood film noir was the post-World
War II period, encompassing the late 1940s and early 1950s (the actual term was
first used, by a French critic, in reference to Hollywood product in 1946).
Cultural historians have attempted to locate an explanation for this sudden
flowering in a sense of increased alienation and cynicism, though I've never
found any of these theories particularly convincing. The Japanese post-war
experience, however, was cataclysmic enough to profitably suggest the birth of a
noir culture. Which is an idea David Peace takes hold of and runs with in
Tokyo Year Zero.
It is the summer of 1946 and Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police
Department has to negotiate the human and material wreckage of Japan's defeat while on
the trail of a serial killer. Many noir basics are in place: a world
where nothing is what it seems, a state of corruption and moral ambiguity where
members of the police department and the nascent yakuza underworld
sometimes find themselves on the same side, a series of violent crimes, an
overworked detective who suffers from lice, insomnia, and a guilty past, and a
ruined urban landscape that is always either miserably hot or slick with
rain.
It is a world Peace vividly evokes in all of its sights, sounds and smells.
His Tokyo is identified with sweat, the stench of human waste, and the noise of
the street. The story is told stream-of-consciousness style, and Minami's
thoughts are dominated by the repetition of a plague of trivial annoyances. The
lice he scratches, endlessly (gari-gari). The hammering of construction
workers (ton-ton). The dripping of the rain (potsu-potsu). Hard
enough to think, let alone sleep, when tormented by these imps. And so his mind
begins to buckle under the strain.
The beat of Peace's prose, built around the incessant repetition of short
sentence fragments, obsessive thoughts, and sound effects, captures Minami's mental stress perfectly. Surprisingly, given how irritating such writing could
easily get to be, it works. At least most of the time. A gun fight rendered in a
series of "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!"s just seems silly.
And even when it does work it is irritating, but is nevertheless redeemed
by a
nervous and intense momentum that keeps things moving even when they seem to be grinding to
a synaptic halt (the Calmotin referred to in the following passage is a sleeping
pill):
I turn their shoes to face the door. No Calmotin. No alcohol.
No sleep. No dreams. No air. No breeze. I am out of luck. Everything is falling
apart. I turn their shoes to face the door. No Calmotin. No alcohol. No
sleep. No dreams. No air. No breeze. I am out of luck. Everything falling apart.
I turn their shoes to face the door, three times I turn their shoes to face
the door, three times I turn their shoes to face the door. No Calmotin. No
alcohol. No sleep. No dreams. No air. No breeze. No luck. Everything falling
apart again, over and over and over, again and again and again -
She is beside me now, beside me now, beside me now . . .
I think about her all the time -
She is laying beside me now . . .
Despite the simplicity of the language and its stripped-down, incantatory
insistence, it is not always easy to understand what is going on. Detective
Minami deliberately remains a cipher. And at least
one reader will confess to being confused by the ending, which has the
disorienting effect of calling into question much of what has happened in the
rest of the book. Some confusion and open-endedness are part of the noir
genre, but in this case things seem to get carried away. I found myself,
uncomfortably, reminded of Irvine Welsh's Filth.
This is the first book in a projected Tokyo Trilogy. Given its insistently
introverted and idiosyncratic point of view, it will be interesting to see how
Peace imagines the city in his next installment. As stylish and original a take
on the pulps as Tokyo Year Zero is, it also leads to a creative dead end.
There is nothing left to say of this place, in this voice. Now for something
completely different.
Notes:
Review first published online December 20, 2007.
BACK
