Occupied City

Others have reviewed the content of this book, I will not go into details. The story is highly pertinent and feels terribly relevant in today's world. The lies, the deceit, the helplessness of ordinary citizens ... all that is captured well. This is literature, or at the very least a valiant literary effort far beyond the average crime novel. I am European and have studied Japanese and Japanese literature. Knowing the works Peace himself refers to in the acknowledgments helps a lot in understanding the structure of this book. From the very beginning, one feels reminded of Soseki & Co. "Konna yume-wo mita ...". The First Night ... Peace uses the instruments of Japanese dream and crime fiction of the turn of the century, such as ellipsis, repetition, etc.; many of which are still very much present in modern Japanese works. He does so with aplomb, and only rarely stumbles. The problem with this approach in an English novel is that many of the tools of Japanese fiction are by definition extensions of the Japanese language. They only work to their full effect in Japanese. Whole chapters full of ellipses are normal in Japanese, where even in ordinary speech sentences are very often incomplete, where, in fact, incompleteness is a sign of high style, of literacy. The same style in English sounds highly contrived. Incomplete statements in Japanese are often completed by the context, or the context of similar statements in other situations. That is completely lost in English. The endless repetitions are unoffensive in Japanese, where poetic style has always been part of ordinary prose, and prose itself, one may say, does not exist as separate from poetry as it does in English. Thus the tools of Japanese writing in an English novels often feel too alien, too out of place, and hard to grasp. I imagine this is even worse for the reader unfamiliar with the Japanese background. Peace's use of Japanese style elements in English is often incongruous, and in many places simply not proficient enough, as if he lacked a full grasp of the literature he is emulating. The novel translated back into Japanese, which I have done for some parts as an exercise in literary criticism, feels almost childishly simplistic. Even so, it is a great effort. This is the work of a good crime writer who tried something different, something really difficult: the transposition of a literary genre and style into another language. If he failed to do so perfectly, it is still a very convincing effort.

On January 26, 1948, in the Occupied City of Toyo, a man claiming to be Dr. Yamaguchi Jiro of the Ministry of Health and Welfare arrives at the Taikoku Bank at closing to explaining to management that dysentery has broken out in the neighborhood. He claims the Occupation sent him to provide medication to those most likely exposed to the disease. They take the medicine, but rather quickly after taking it, twelve die and four fall into a coma. Dr. Jiro, if that is his name, leaves with all the money. He is a mass murder because he has poisoned his victims. The lead detective is frustrated with the descriptions of witnesses that vary while the media and others claim the incident was a biological weapon experiment by the occupiers but an American Occupation doctor scoffs as that thinking the idea is inane. This is a super historical whodunit as twelve different people including one of the dead with various perspectives explain how they see what happened while providing a profound look at Tokyo just after World War II as that is how they filter the homicides. Each "lights" a candle for a city weeping, but brings their baggage and psychological defense mechanisms to cope with the horrific mass murder at a time when the country struggles with esteem having lost the war. Harriet Klausner

In this heart-thumping experimental novel which bursts the bounds of the usual genre categories, British author David Peace creates an impressionistic story of a real Tokyo bank robbery and the deaths of twelve bank employees on January 26, 1948. A man representing himself as a doctor investigating a case of potentially fatal dysentery in the neighborhood appears at the Shiina-Machi branch of the Teikoku Bank, saying he must inoculate all the employees in the bank against this disease. Two minutes after receiving the medication, sixteen victims, writhing in agony, have fallen unconscious, and twelve of them die, poisoned with cyanide. The physician then removes the day's receipts and disappears. As detectives investigate those who might have had access to cyanide, they pursue an artist who uses cyanide in making tempura paints-a man who already has a history of fraud. The man is arrested and jailed, though a witness has stated unequivocally that he is not the killer. Further investigation of this crime involves a wide-ranging study of Japan's use of biological warfare in Manchuria, before and during World War II. Cyanide was the subject of much research and experimentation there by the Japanese Pingfan Army Unit 731, the chemical lab unit, and any one of the Pingfan soldiers could have committed these murders. Further investigation suggests that officials from all sides have colluded in a coverup of biological weapons programs. The author uses a Rashomon-like structure for the novel, featuring twelve different narrators, each of whom, illuminated by a candle, tells his own story regarding the bank robbery and then blows out his candle, creating a darker and darker atmosphere until the final narrator leaves the participants in the dark--at the edge of the abyss. The individual testimonies build a complete archival record of the real story, which attests to the author's comprehensive research during the many years he lived in Tokyo. Despite the full background material, however, the novel is by no means straightforward or journalistic. Instead, the author creates swirling images of the Occupation of Japan, developing kaleidoscopic impressions which change at warp speed. The novel's pace is driven by its language, which twists and turns in upon itself, echoes, and repeats, more like music than prose in style and emotional intensity. Sometimes the novel feels like a long canon, or "round," while at other times one can only think of a grand operatic chorus. Sometimes four or five different speakers reveal information simultaneously (often within the same sentence). Each speaks as if in a soliloquy, talking over the other characters and interrupting their sentences to include their own thoughts. It is a uniquely powerful technique which requires the reader's "willing suspension of literary expectations," and it can be both exhilarating and challenging. The author does not always distinguish between his real people and his ghostly