Tokyo Year Zero was published by Faber and Faber in 2007. It is the first volume of Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy — a move from Yorkshire to Japan that surprised readers but makes perfect sense: Peace had been living in Tokyo for years, and the themes of institutional corruption, state violence, and individual guilt translate seamlessly between post-industrial England and post-war Japan.
Detective Minami investigates the murder of young women in the ruins of Tokyo in August 1946 — one year after Japan’s surrender. The city is destroyed by firebombing, the population is starving, the American occupation forces control everything, and the Japanese institutions — police, government, corporations — are frantically concealing their wartime crimes. Minami himself has secrets from the war that make him vulnerable to blackmail.
Peace’s style achieves new intensity in this setting: the repetition and obsessive circling of his prose perfectly mirrors the psychological state of a defeated population — everyone going over and over the same traumatic memories, unable to move forward because the past has not been reckoned with. The novel is based on a real case (the Kodaira Yoshio murders) but uses it to explore the larger question of collective guilt in post-war Japan.
Collecting Tokyo Year Zero
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2007): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25