Tokyo Redux was published by Faber and Faber in 2021, completing the Tokyo Trilogy after a twelve-year gap. The novel centers on the real case of Shimoyama Sadanori — the first president of Japan National Railways, found dead on a train track in July 1949. Was it suicide or murder? The case was never solved and remains one of Japan’s most famous unsolved mysteries.
Peace uses the Shimoyama case as the spine for a novel that spans four decades: from the occupation-era investigation in 1949, through Japan’s period of high economic growth, to the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1988. Three protagonists across three time periods investigate or encounter the case, and through their stories Peace reveals the continuities of Japanese institutional corruption from the occupation through the economic miracle: the same wartime criminals who were protected by the Americans became the architects of postwar prosperity.
The novel completes Peace’s argument about Japan: the economic miracle was not a redemption of wartime guilt but an evasion of it. The same structures of authoritarian power, corporate-state fusion, and suppression of dissent that produced the militarist state were repurposed — with American assistance — into the mechanisms of capitalist growth.
Collecting Tokyo Redux
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2021): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$45
- Very good: $10–$20