It’s no secret that I am intensely connected with Japan. I lived there for three years, and that experience imprinted on me a love for and unending questions about the place. It is one country about which Westerners feel comfortable making gross generalizations. These are usually along the lines of “Japan is such a crazy/zany/weird place” and suggest that all Japanese people have agreed to abandon good taste and morality. How else to explain a video clip where the young members of girl group Morning Musume (Morning’s Daughter) strap ham to the tops of their heads and poke their noggins through holes in a wooden platform where a hungry gila monster runs loose? The girls, of course, deliver cochlea-shredding screams before they duck away; the last girl standing is the winner. This, like the many other such clips, leaves me a bit empty. It’s not that I don’t laugh; on the contrary, I’ve heard Morning Musume and I’m rooting for the gila monster. What bothers me, rather, is how this clip and its ham-headed hi-jinx fit in to the American conception of Japan.
Upon hearing that I lived in Japan, I get the usual questions. Do you speak Japanese? Did you speak it before you went? Did you ever see a vending machine selling girls’ underwear? Isn’t it really crazy there? (Yes. No. No. Not really.) What gets me is that by the third or fourth question we are already in Wacky Japan, land of Beer-o-mats and ass-warming toilets, and perhaps, for the historically minded, sumo-wrestling geishas. Wacky Japan, well, it just isn’t as wacky as most people would like it to be. Japan is, in short, a foreign country. They do things differently there. The Wacky Japan line only dumbs the place down, brackets out its history and the intricacies of it culture: the nation as carnival sideshow. I mean, have you seen those rockabilly haircuts? Compensated dating???!!!
So it will be no great surprise that I have been disappointed by books I’ve read that have been set in Japan. The Japanese characters are flat, or the whole cast is imported from America. Movies don’t handle a Japanese setting much better: while I love Lost in Translation, Japan is only a backdrop, a place where Americans discover themselves while Tokyo and her citizens are merely background – an entire city relegated to white noise.
When my husband quietly put Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace in my reading pile I was a bit apprehensive. An English author writing about immediate post-war Tokyo? There was a lot of room for disappointment; these waters have plenty of shipwrecks in them.
Tokyo Year Zero is, at heart, a murder mystery based on the very real serial murderer Yoshio Kodaira. But it cannot really be called a mystery or even thriller because the reader is too far inside Detective Minami’s head to create adequate cat-and-mouse tension. Peace deploys his skills as a novelist quite nimbly: the very first thing you read is a stream of consciousness flashback from a soldier roughly outlining his departure for Manchuria with fragments of other memories mixed in. Peace’s choice of names (there are detectives named for all points of the compass except East) and locations (the main police stations are near the Imperial Palace – the empty heart of Tokyo, off-limits to the common Japanese) are all carefully chosen.
For the most part, the reader follows Detective Minami as he stumbles through a murder investigation. At the same time, the reader sees Detective Minami’s mind as he stumbles towards a psychotic break. Peace employs the best use of repetition that I’ve ever seen: the ton-ton hammering of post-war Tokyo rebuilding, an entire city as a building zone with noise spilling everywhere; the scenes that Minami replays in his head, trying to make the ending come out right; the omnipresent loss of family, home, identity, structure, jobs, food. It’s remarkable how much Peace achieves with technique alone. I guarantee at some point you will attempt to bracket out the noise markers, and that will put you in the same frame of mind as Detective Minami, our mentally disintegrating anti-hero.
Something else Tokyo Year Zero does especially well is address Japanese atrocities in China. Kodaira and Minami are both veterans who served time in China; both are confused at how their brutal behavior on the mainland earned them medals while U.S.-occupied Japan wants nothing to do with them. Peace does not spare his characters from reckoning with their deeds and the reader is not spared the details of those atrocities. The characters deal with their pasts in different ways, to be sure, but the consequences of their acts remain with them. While Peace doesn’t linger on the Chinese survivors, he does hint at their outcomes by setting up a parallel structure with a Japanese brothel where abandoned women try to eke out an existence stripped of any human dignity. Peace does not put Japan in the zany box, but treats both wartime imperial savagery as well as post-war turmoil with careful regard. I have to say again that he delivers a master class in repetition, elevating it beyond gimmick into something new altogether.
The fans of Wacky Japan, who celebrate the Naked Festival and Engrish, bring a certain post-modern ironic humor to the table, but precious little else. There are plenty of websites that chronicle craziest things about Japan from a Westerner’s point of view, but these are purely anecdotal – good for a chuckle but not much more. What adds to the conversation is an understanding that Japan is yes, at times, weird, but also serious. Light and dark. Horrific perpetrator and nuclear victim. Peace seeks out one of the hardest, saddest moments in history and somehow draws out a novel, and an exceptionally well-written one at that. No ham hats required.
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