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Tokyo Trilogy #2
Occupied City
On January 26, 1948, a man posing as a public health official arrives at a bank in Tokyo. He explains that he’s there to treat everyone who might have been exposed to a recent outbreak of dysentery. Soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, four are unconscious, and the “official” has fled. Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives including a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an “occult detective,” and a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Told with David Peace’s brilliantly idiosyncratic and mesmerizing voice, Occupied City is a stunningly audacious work from a singular writer.
320 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2009
42 people are currently reading
1373 people want to read
About the author
David Peace
36 books540 followersDavid Peace was born in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, near Wakefield. He left Manchester Polytechnic in 1991, and went to Istanbul to teach English. In 1994 he took up a teaching post in Tokyo and now lives there with his family.
His formative years were shadowed by the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper, and this had a profound influence on him which led to a strong interest in crime. His quartet of Red Riding books grew from this obsession with the dark side of Yorkshire. These are powerful novels of crime and police corruption, using the Yorkshire Ripper as their basis and inspiration. They are entitled Nineteen Seventy-Four, (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001), and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002), and have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese.
In 2003 David Peace was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty "Best Young British Novelists." His novel GB84, set during the 1984 miners' strike, was published in 2005.
from contemporarywriters.com
His formative years were shadowed by the activities of the Yorkshire Ripper, and this had a profound influence on him which led to a strong interest in crime. His quartet of Red Riding books grew from this obsession with the dark side of Yorkshire. These are powerful novels of crime and police corruption, using the Yorkshire Ripper as their basis and inspiration. They are entitled Nineteen Seventy-Four, (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001), and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002), and have been translated into French, Italian, German and Japanese.
In 2003 David Peace was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty "Best Young British Novelists." His novel GB84, set during the 1984 miners' strike, was published in 2005.
from contemporarywriters.com
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 111 reviews
February 6, 2017
Tokyo 1948: a man posing as a health inspector tells a bank manager there has been an outbreak of dysentery nearby. He asks the bank manager to gather together all the staff because he has brought with him a serum that will protect them from the infection. The health inspector shows the sixteen staff how to administer the serum. However, he isn’t a health inspector and the serum isn’t a serum. It’s a deadly poison. The killer disappears with some of the bank’s money though not all of it. A mystery. This is a true story of a crime that still causes controversy in Japan. Many believe an innocent man was hanged for the crime.
Peace uses for his structure a ghost-story-telling game popularised during the Edo period in which each narrator extinguishes a candle when they have told their tale of supernatural horror. In other words, the darkness increases as the night wears on. Peace’s narrators include the victims of the crime, the investigators of the crime and those accused of the crime. He explores one popular hypothesis that the killer was a disgruntled member of Unit 731, a Japanese biological weapons division that bred plague-infected rats and fleas to spread disease in China and infected prisoners of war with deadly incubated toxins.
This is story telling at its most inventive and, you could also say, at its most challenging for the reader. I would argue that the no writer has quite managed to employ rhythm as such a key illuminating component of storytelling as Virginia Woolf did in The Waves. The repetitive rhythm of her sentences in that book is like a hidden accumulative part of its reach and meaning. Peace also is a rhythm-master and here reminded me of Woolf, though like Woolf on heroin. Both he and Woolf use rhythm to probe into the darkness of the human psyche. Except where Virginia seeks out light, Peace seeks out new depths of darkness. His hammering highly stylised repetitive prose style will probably alienate 80% of readers – it doesn’t always work but when it does it’s fabulous. I’m going to quote a passage at random to give an idea of how he writes –
But the War Machine rolls on, never stopping, never resting, never sleeping, always rising, always consuming, always devouring. On and on, the War Machine rolls on, across empires and across democracies, on and on, over the well-fed and over the ill-fed, on and on, and, all the while, from hand to hand, hand into wallet, wallet into bank, bank into loan, loan to stocks and shares, my stocks and my shares, money passes, money changes, money grows-
If you fancy a different kind of read….
Peace uses for his structure a ghost-story-telling game popularised during the Edo period in which each narrator extinguishes a candle when they have told their tale of supernatural horror. In other words, the darkness increases as the night wears on. Peace’s narrators include the victims of the crime, the investigators of the crime and those accused of the crime. He explores one popular hypothesis that the killer was a disgruntled member of Unit 731, a Japanese biological weapons division that bred plague-infected rats and fleas to spread disease in China and infected prisoners of war with deadly incubated toxins.
This is story telling at its most inventive and, you could also say, at its most challenging for the reader. I would argue that the no writer has quite managed to employ rhythm as such a key illuminating component of storytelling as Virginia Woolf did in The Waves. The repetitive rhythm of her sentences in that book is like a hidden accumulative part of its reach and meaning. Peace also is a rhythm-master and here reminded me of Woolf, though like Woolf on heroin. Both he and Woolf use rhythm to probe into the darkness of the human psyche. Except where Virginia seeks out light, Peace seeks out new depths of darkness. His hammering highly stylised repetitive prose style will probably alienate 80% of readers – it doesn’t always work but when it does it’s fabulous. I’m going to quote a passage at random to give an idea of how he writes –
But the War Machine rolls on, never stopping, never resting, never sleeping, always rising, always consuming, always devouring. On and on, the War Machine rolls on, across empires and across democracies, on and on, over the well-fed and over the ill-fed, on and on, and, all the while, from hand to hand, hand into wallet, wallet into bank, bank into loan, loan to stocks and shares, my stocks and my shares, money passes, money changes, money grows-
If you fancy a different kind of read….
October 1, 2015
If there is a more ambitious crime writer currently producing high quality works of bleak historical noir that crackle with experimental prose, then I want to know his or her name. But for now let it stand that David Peace is the real fucking deal. Occupied City is Peace's ballsiest (ovariesiest) fictional approach yet to putting the psyche of a place and time on the page.
The city is America-occupied Japan, the godforsaken year is 1948 - and on a lazy January afternoon, a man in a medical uniform walks into a bank and informs the staff that he is a government official here to inoculate all present against a possible outbreak of dysentery. Within minutes twelve men, women and children are dead, while four others cling to life in hospital. A media frenzy ensues to capture this mass murderer who appears to have poisoned all these innocent people as a means of robbing the bank. Many months later a respected water-color artist is arrested for the crimes; and though a great deal of evidence points to the suspect being a patsy, the poor painter spends the next forty years in prison.
This slice-of-horrific-life true crime serves as the impetus for David Peace to go at his themes like a madman. Taking a page from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's "Rashōmon" (famously adapted for the silver screen by Akira Kurosawa), Occupied City is structured as a séance, in which an unnamed writer (presumably meta-fictional David Peace), bears witness to the accounts of twelve different restless spirits, each of whom have suffered tragic fates in the events surrounding this crime.
The first chapter- which is relayed through the plural pronoun "We" - recounts the mass murder itself from the point of view of all twelve of those poisoned, setting the tone for the rest of the novel and its many idiosyncratic voices. A xenophobic detective in the midst of a mental breakdown, a gangster turned ruthless entrepreneur, an occult detective, an American scientist and a haunted survivor of the mass poisoning are just a few of the many unhappy souls the reader will meet as their stories are told through a variety of formats such as a detective’s casebook, personal letters, magic incantations, classified documents, fables and torrents of gothic-tinged poetic flourishes.
As always Peace isn’t the type of writer given to hand holding, and while there is a great deal of plot delivered from conflicting viewpoints, it’s up to the reader to make many of the connections that link the narratives together. Peace’s penchant for repetition and verse-like delivery is at its most polished here, deftly setting the tone for post-war Tokyo: a defeated city of defeated people, with little hope in sight as the Americans work to shape the country into a model of the U.S., and as the politicians left over from the previous regime scramble to cover their own asses and maintain the status quo of control over the masses—and all of this in the face of wartime atrocities involving biological warfare research conducted on thousands of POWs. After all, as the old cliché goes, history is not written by the downtrodden losers but by the victors with their great white-washing of history we call “progress.”
The city is America-occupied Japan, the godforsaken year is 1948 - and on a lazy January afternoon, a man in a medical uniform walks into a bank and informs the staff that he is a government official here to inoculate all present against a possible outbreak of dysentery. Within minutes twelve men, women and children are dead, while four others cling to life in hospital. A media frenzy ensues to capture this mass murderer who appears to have poisoned all these innocent people as a means of robbing the bank. Many months later a respected water-color artist is arrested for the crimes; and though a great deal of evidence points to the suspect being a patsy, the poor painter spends the next forty years in prison.
This slice-of-horrific-life true crime serves as the impetus for David Peace to go at his themes like a madman. Taking a page from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's "Rashōmon" (famously adapted for the silver screen by Akira Kurosawa), Occupied City is structured as a séance, in which an unnamed writer (presumably meta-fictional David Peace), bears witness to the accounts of twelve different restless spirits, each of whom have suffered tragic fates in the events surrounding this crime.
The first chapter- which is relayed through the plural pronoun "We" - recounts the mass murder itself from the point of view of all twelve of those poisoned, setting the tone for the rest of the novel and its many idiosyncratic voices. A xenophobic detective in the midst of a mental breakdown, a gangster turned ruthless entrepreneur, an occult detective, an American scientist and a haunted survivor of the mass poisoning are just a few of the many unhappy souls the reader will meet as their stories are told through a variety of formats such as a detective’s casebook, personal letters, magic incantations, classified documents, fables and torrents of gothic-tinged poetic flourishes.
As always Peace isn’t the type of writer given to hand holding, and while there is a great deal of plot delivered from conflicting viewpoints, it’s up to the reader to make many of the connections that link the narratives together. Peace’s penchant for repetition and verse-like delivery is at its most polished here, deftly setting the tone for post-war Tokyo: a defeated city of defeated people, with little hope in sight as the Americans work to shape the country into a model of the U.S., and as the politicians left over from the previous regime scramble to cover their own asses and maintain the status quo of control over the masses—and all of this in the face of wartime atrocities involving biological warfare research conducted on thousands of POWs. After all, as the old cliché goes, history is not written by the downtrodden losers but by the victors with their great white-washing of history we call “progress.”
February 7, 2017
Είναι ένα κλειστοφοβικό, σκληρό βιβλίο που θυμίζει ιατροδικαστική έρευνα το πιο ενδιαφέρον αστυνομικό που διάβασα εδώ και καιρό (χωρίς να είμαι και μεγάλη φαν του είδους); Ναι. Ξεκάθαρα ναι.
Μ’ αυτό εδώ το μυθιστόρημα ο Peace σε κρατάει σε αγωνία, σε αποσυντονίζει και σε βγάζει έξω απ’ την comfort zone σου. Και-ταυτόχρονα-κάνει ένα ηχηρό σχόλιο για τον πόλεμο, που αποτελεί βασικό συστατικό ύπαρξης των καπιταλιστικών κοινωνιών.
Ενδιαφέρουσα και η δομή των κεφαλαίων, που-όπως διάβασα,μιας και δεν είμαι εξοικειωμένη με την ιαπωνική κουλτύρα -ακολουθεί κάποιο παραδοσιακό τρόπο αφήγησης των σαμουράι (ο ίδιος ο συγγραφέας έζησε κάποια χρόνια στην Ιαπωνία): υπάρχουν 12 αφηγητές και ο καθένας, αφού διηγηθεί την ιστορία του-σβήνει από ένα κερί. Από το φως στο σκοτάδι. Εκεί που έσβηναν ένα-ένα τα κεριά, ένιωθα πως άρχιζα να βυθίζομαι στο σκοτάδι, να ελαττώνεται ο αέρας δίπλα μου και να μου δημιουργούνται νέοι φόβοι απ’ το πουθενά.
Μοναδικό μειονέκτημα που βρήκα-και έχασε πόντους/αστεράκια (whatever)-είναι ότι σε πολλά σημεία της αφήγησης ο συγγραφέας επαναλάμβανε πολλές προτάσεις ξανά και ξανάˑ μια τεχνική που με κουράζει. Κατά τα’ άλλα, μου άρεσε πολύ το βιβλίο και θ’ αναζητήσω στο μέλλον κι άλλα βιβλία του Peace σίγουρα.
August 12, 2022
12
[…un gioco di racconti di fantasmi popolare durante il periodo Edo (XVII secolo) in uso tra i samurai come dimostrazione ludica di coraggio…un gruppo di persone si riunisce al tramonto alla luce azzurra di candele accese. Ciascuno a turno racconta una storia dell’orrore e al termine una candela viene spenta...a mano a mano che la serata procede la sala diventa sempre più buia e tenebrosa fino a che l’ultima candela viene spenta e cala il buio più completo…in quel momento nelle tenebre appaiono le anime perdute e i mostri evocati dalle storie…]
Dodici Candele, Dodici vittime della rapina iniziale, Dodici capitoli di Tokyo città occupata
Avendo letto in passato una quantità di gialli/thriller/polizieschi, sono portato principalmente a dare valore all’originalità, nell’ambientazione, nei personaggi, nella struttura, nello stile. Con Peace trovo pane per i miei denti perché credo che questo romanzo, nel bene e nel male, non abbia eguali nella narrativa di genere. Affrancatosi dall’influenza ellroyana, evidente nell’eccellente quartetto collocato nello Yorkshire (“Red Riding Hood”,2000-2003), Peace spinge molto più in là gli elementi della sua narrativa nei romanzi che hanno come cornice il Giappone, dove l’autore inglese si è trasferito una ventina di anni fa.
Per strutturare questo romanzo tratto da una storia realmente accaduta nel 1948, l’autore dichiara di essersi ispirato a Rasho-mon (libro e film) con una prospettiva sugli avvenimenti scandita dall’avvicendarsi in veste di io narrante dei personaggi coinvolti (vittime, assassini veri o presunti, testimoni, detective, giornalisti) mettendo infine il lettore di fronte all’impossibilità di individuare, così come nel capolavoro di Kurosawa, una verità oggettiva, univoca e conclusiva.
Questo tortuoso percorso in dodici tappe è reso ancor più complesso dall’uso di altrettante forme stilistiche radicalmente differenti, da narrazioni ancora “lineari” (nei limiti concessi dai toni enfatici, impetuosi, reiterativi, ansiogeni che sempre caratterizzano la prosa di Peace), ad altre in cui il flusso del discorso sembra disintegrarsi sotto i nostri occhi in ellissi e ripetizioni, fino all’acme del tremendo interminabile capitolo 9, tour de force che travalica i confini della leggibilità, mescolando all’interno di ogni capoverso tre diverse linee narrative, riprodotte rispettivamente in minuscolo, maiuscolo e corsivo!
Nel corso della trama, l’inchiesta sulla rapina alla banca Teikoku, che provocò la morte per avvelenamento di dodici persone, sconfina in un più ampio quadro sugli esperimenti mirati alla Guerra Batteriologica (e Chimica) che Stati Uniti, Giappone e Russia in diverso modo esercitarono, anche su cavie umane, negli anni ’30 e ’40.
Infine non va dimenticato, come il titolo stesso del romanzo ci ricorda, che tutta la vicenda si svolge nel dopoguerra, in un Giappone devastato e oppresso dalle forze d’occupazione alleate che scorrazzano sulle jeep per le strade di Tokyo e che assumono a loro volta un ruolo quanto meno ambiguo nei fatti narrati.
[…un gioco di racconti di fantasmi popolare durante il periodo Edo (XVII secolo) in uso tra i samurai come dimostrazione ludica di coraggio…un gruppo di persone si riunisce al tramonto alla luce azzurra di candele accese. Ciascuno a turno racconta una storia dell’orrore e al termine una candela viene spenta...a mano a mano che la serata procede la sala diventa sempre più buia e tenebrosa fino a che l’ultima candela viene spenta e cala il buio più completo…in quel momento nelle tenebre appaiono le anime perdute e i mostri evocati dalle storie…]
Dodici Candele, Dodici vittime della rapina iniziale, Dodici capitoli di Tokyo città occupata
Avendo letto in passato una quantità di gialli/thriller/polizieschi, sono portato principalmente a dare valore all’originalità, nell’ambientazione, nei personaggi, nella struttura, nello stile. Con Peace trovo pane per i miei denti perché credo che questo romanzo, nel bene e nel male, non abbia eguali nella narrativa di genere. Affrancatosi dall’influenza ellroyana, evidente nell’eccellente quartetto collocato nello Yorkshire (“Red Riding Hood”,2000-2003), Peace spinge molto più in là gli elementi della sua narrativa nei romanzi che hanno come cornice il Giappone, dove l’autore inglese si è trasferito una ventina di anni fa.
Per strutturare questo romanzo tratto da una storia realmente accaduta nel 1948, l’autore dichiara di essersi ispirato a Rasho-mon (libro e film) con una prospettiva sugli avvenimenti scandita dall’avvicendarsi in veste di io narrante dei personaggi coinvolti (vittime, assassini veri o presunti, testimoni, detective, giornalisti) mettendo infine il lettore di fronte all’impossibilità di individuare, così come nel capolavoro di Kurosawa, una verità oggettiva, univoca e conclusiva.
Questo tortuoso percorso in dodici tappe è reso ancor più complesso dall’uso di altrettante forme stilistiche radicalmente differenti, da narrazioni ancora “lineari” (nei limiti concessi dai toni enfatici, impetuosi, reiterativi, ansiogeni che sempre caratterizzano la prosa di Peace), ad altre in cui il flusso del discorso sembra disintegrarsi sotto i nostri occhi in ellissi e ripetizioni, fino all’acme del tremendo interminabile capitolo 9, tour de force che travalica i confini della leggibilità, mescolando all’interno di ogni capoverso tre diverse linee narrative, riprodotte rispettivamente in minuscolo, maiuscolo e corsivo!
Nel corso della trama, l’inchiesta sulla rapina alla banca Teikoku, che provocò la morte per avvelenamento di dodici persone, sconfina in un più ampio quadro sugli esperimenti mirati alla Guerra Batteriologica (e Chimica) che Stati Uniti, Giappone e Russia in diverso modo esercitarono, anche su cavie umane, negli anni ’30 e ’40.
Infine non va dimenticato, come il titolo stesso del romanzo ci ricorda, che tutta la vicenda si svolge nel dopoguerra, in un Giappone devastato e oppresso dalle forze d’occupazione alleate che scorrazzano sulle jeep per le strade di Tokyo e che assumono a loro volta un ruolo quanto meno ambiguo nei fatti narrati.
July 28, 2025
Setting: Tokyo, Japan; post-war (late 1940's).
This novel was based on a true story regarding a man who entered a bank in Tokyo posing as a doctor working with the occupying forces and persuaded all the staff to take a medicine to prevent them from contracting dysentery - but the supposed medicine was in fact poison and twelve of sixteen of the staff ended up dead.
This is the story of the police investigation, told from various points of view but in the style of a ghost-story-telling game from the Edo period of Japanese history. I disliked the writing style generally, although some characters were easier to read than others, and often found myself skimming over the many repetitive sections. I couldn't really understand the need for the detective's story, particularly in one section, being told effectively with three story threads in the same paragraph, being separated by one being in capitals, one in italics and one in normal type - and ended up just reading the 'normal type' story and ignoring the rest. Not an easy or enjoyable reading experience for me, which I have found to lesser degrees with this author's books before, so I think I will be removing all his other books from my TBR based on this and previous showings! - 4/10.
This novel was based on a true story regarding a man who entered a bank in Tokyo posing as a doctor working with the occupying forces and persuaded all the staff to take a medicine to prevent them from contracting dysentery - but the supposed medicine was in fact poison and twelve of sixteen of the staff ended up dead.
This is the story of the police investigation, told from various points of view but in the style of a ghost-story-telling game from the Edo period of Japanese history. I disliked the writing style generally, although some characters were easier to read than others, and often found myself skimming over the many repetitive sections. I couldn't really understand the need for the detective's story, particularly in one section, being told effectively with three story threads in the same paragraph, being separated by one being in capitals, one in italics and one in normal type - and ended up just reading the 'normal type' story and ignoring the rest. Not an easy or enjoyable reading experience for me, which I have found to lesser degrees with this author's books before, so I think I will be removing all his other books from my TBR based on this and previous showings! - 4/10.
November 27, 2016
Audiobook. Hated it.
The author repeats phrases continually. Yes, repeats continually. Continually repeats the same maybe a slight change in order. Every sentence. Sentence repeats. One time for each character. Yes, each character. Did I say it repeats? Yes, repeats each time. Each and every sentence repeating.
I made through disc one. At that point I knew I wanted to stomp on the disc-not a good thing to do with a library item. I checked this out thinking it sounded like an interesting mystery based on real events. Could be but the constant repetition supposedly by various characters viewpoints (not evident with this reading) was maddening and pretentious.
I'm not sure the style of this book is suited to audio listening format but I doubt I'd finish it on paper. The reader did not seem to be able to differentiate various voices emphasizing the repetition in the worst way.Looking at other reviews the writer apparently also used various fonts and layouts. This of course is not evident at all in a listening format. But the repetition. Did I say it repeats? Yes, it repeats. Hated it. Yes, hated it. Hated the repetition, yes.
Not for me.
The author repeats phrases continually. Yes, repeats continually. Continually repeats the same maybe a slight change in order. Every sentence. Sentence repeats. One time for each character. Yes, each character. Did I say it repeats? Yes, repeats each time. Each and every sentence repeating.
I made through disc one. At that point I knew I wanted to stomp on the disc-not a good thing to do with a library item. I checked this out thinking it sounded like an interesting mystery based on real events. Could be but the constant repetition supposedly by various characters viewpoints (not evident with this reading) was maddening and pretentious.
I'm not sure the style of this book is suited to audio listening format but I doubt I'd finish it on paper. The reader did not seem to be able to differentiate various voices emphasizing the repetition in the worst way.Looking at other reviews the writer apparently also used various fonts and layouts. This of course is not evident at all in a listening format. But the repetition. Did I say it repeats? Yes, it repeats. Hated it. Yes, hated it. Hated the repetition, yes.
Not for me.
December 14, 2015
Segundo libro de la "Trilogía de Tokio", el primero 'Tokyo Año Cero', del mismo autor, es muy bueno y la secuela se me antojó fácilmente, este sin embargo, es un desastre.
"Occupied City" cuenta la historia real de Hirasawa Sadamichi en el caso de los asesinatos por envenenamiento en Tokio de 1948.
La novela es en realidad un largo "poema", la prosa no tiene realmente una estructura interesante. No hay nada de donde aferrarse y es extremadamente repetitivo. La intención parece ser evocar la emotividad, pero la verdad el formato es atorrante, pero más que nada aburrido.
La historia está narrada desde distintos puntos de vista de los testigos, policías o sobrevivientes, algunos, más bien, uno solo es brillante. El oficial del Ejército de Estados Unidos que a través de cartas a su esposa y las notas a su cuartel general nos hace presenciar su descenso a la locura, el cual es bastante desgarrador. El resto, es totalmente prescindible.
He visto reseñas de gente enloquecida por la prosa o el formato narrativo experimental del libro, señores, esto es de principiantes, léanse a Cortazar y después hablamos.
"Occupied City" cuenta la historia real de Hirasawa Sadamichi en el caso de los asesinatos por envenenamiento en Tokio de 1948.
La novela es en realidad un largo "poema", la prosa no tiene realmente una estructura interesante. No hay nada de donde aferrarse y es extremadamente repetitivo. La intención parece ser evocar la emotividad, pero la verdad el formato es atorrante, pero más que nada aburrido.
La historia está narrada desde distintos puntos de vista de los testigos, policías o sobrevivientes, algunos, más bien, uno solo es brillante. El oficial del Ejército de Estados Unidos que a través de cartas a su esposa y las notas a su cuartel general nos hace presenciar su descenso a la locura, el cual es bastante desgarrador. El resto, es totalmente prescindible.
He visto reseñas de gente enloquecida por la prosa o el formato narrativo experimental del libro, señores, esto es de principiantes, léanse a Cortazar y después hablamos.
December 20, 2014
when I read Tokyo Year Zero, I was stunned. The book was very special in my eyes, it was different, confusing and impressive. I didn´t know David Peace before, though you always stumble upon his red-riding-qurartett-series, when you are looking for something to read in the book stores. I really looked forward to the second part of his Tokyo-trilogy and when I finally finished it last week, I was overwhelmed.
Occupied City tells the story of a real crime in Tokyo in the year 1948, and from this starting-point describes the after-war-society in Japan. In 1948, a man, impersonating an member of the medical staff, comes into a bank after closing time, and tells the staff to drink a medicine against dysentery. After taking the medicine, most of the staff dies, the man robs the bank and dissappears. The crime hasn´t been solved till today.
The story of the crime and of the inquiry afterwards is told from 12 different perspectives. It begins with the lament of the 12 murdered persons, followed by the report of one of the detectives. Here two main suspects emerge: a painter who acts suspiciously and people who are connected with the japanese biological warfare program in the 2nd worldwar. Other voices follow: e.g. an american scientist, a reporter, one of the surviving victimes, a leading yakuza, another detective with links to the communists, the suspected painter, the real killer and at last the mother of one of the victimes. Every part is written in an individual style: e.g. texts from a notebook, letters to the family, newspaper articles, parts of a diary (with legible crossed out sentences), a kind of japanese puppet-show. The parts are not always easy to read, they repeat or contradict each other, they are mingling past and present or different voices in one head. But the story, the connection of the parts, follows a certain timeline and shows a certain development.
At the end you get the impression that all the characters are victims and culprits at the same time. They are laden with guilt (sometimes only because of having survived), but it seems, that not only their individual acting makes them guilty, but the whole society and the time they live in. They are all connected to the war-past and the present in the occupied city, to other people, to their believes and hopes. They are kind of struggling in a spiders web. The only real victims seem to be the murdered stuff-members and the lonely mother who has lost her son, and one recognizes at the end, that their sacrifice was in vain, because the chance to alter the way the japanese society developed after the war has not been seized. The solving of the crime could have been this chance, making public the background of the crime, which was connected to the biological warfare program. Instead a scapegoat was arrested, and the trials to clear him from the accusations have been unsuccessful till today.
Occupied City tells the story of a real crime in Tokyo in the year 1948, and from this starting-point describes the after-war-society in Japan. In 1948, a man, impersonating an member of the medical staff, comes into a bank after closing time, and tells the staff to drink a medicine against dysentery. After taking the medicine, most of the staff dies, the man robs the bank and dissappears. The crime hasn´t been solved till today.
The story of the crime and of the inquiry afterwards is told from 12 different perspectives. It begins with the lament of the 12 murdered persons, followed by the report of one of the detectives. Here two main suspects emerge: a painter who acts suspiciously and people who are connected with the japanese biological warfare program in the 2nd worldwar. Other voices follow: e.g. an american scientist, a reporter, one of the surviving victimes, a leading yakuza, another detective with links to the communists, the suspected painter, the real killer and at last the mother of one of the victimes. Every part is written in an individual style: e.g. texts from a notebook, letters to the family, newspaper articles, parts of a diary (with legible crossed out sentences), a kind of japanese puppet-show. The parts are not always easy to read, they repeat or contradict each other, they are mingling past and present or different voices in one head. But the story, the connection of the parts, follows a certain timeline and shows a certain development.
At the end you get the impression that all the characters are victims and culprits at the same time. They are laden with guilt (sometimes only because of having survived), but it seems, that not only their individual acting makes them guilty, but the whole society and the time they live in. They are all connected to the war-past and the present in the occupied city, to other people, to their believes and hopes. They are kind of struggling in a spiders web. The only real victims seem to be the murdered stuff-members and the lonely mother who has lost her son, and one recognizes at the end, that their sacrifice was in vain, because the chance to alter the way the japanese society developed after the war has not been seized. The solving of the crime could have been this chance, making public the background of the crime, which was connected to the biological warfare program. Instead a scapegoat was arrested, and the trials to clear him from the accusations have been unsuccessful till today.
April 9, 2022
Allora, usciamo dall’imbarazzo e diciamocelo subito: la scrittura di David Peace nei suoi libri ambientati nella Tokyo post capitolazione giapponese può sembrare delirante. E in parte, anche questo va ammesso, lo è. Provo una stima clamorosa per Marco Pensante e per la sua opera di traduzione, che deve essere stata una via di mezzo fra un viaggio all’inferno e una fatica ercoliana. Stima.
Probabilmente ancora di più che con Tokyo anno zero, primo romanzo della trilogia e probante prova di lettura anche per i più scafati, sorgerà la tentazione di lasciar perdere: si riducono (forse) di un po’ onomatopee e flussi di coscienza tradotti in frasi prive di punteggiatura che avevano contraddistinto quella lettura, ma sorge un filone stretto parente del paranormale che fa un po’ da cornice al romanzo. Al centro, un attentato-rapina (realmente accaduto) in una banca compiuto con un composto chimico e un approfondimento storico sullo sviluppo di armi batteriologiche negli anni Quaranta su sponda giapponese ed americana, una indagine poliziesca ed una più tangenziale alla spy sory, i faticosi racconti di una sopravvissuta e uno stile narrativo che mescola brani di lettere, pagine di diario, interventi giornalistici, racconti in prima e in terza persona, il tutto senza soluzione di continuità e in una sorta di puzzle di cui si fa fatica a ricostruire immagine di partenza.
Una città – e una nazione – ancora scioccata da una sconfitta storica e inaspettata e il confronto fra culture distanti anni luce fanno da sfondo alle pagine più faticose che leggerò quest’anno (ne sono piuttosto sicuro). Ma non ho dubbi sul fatto che sia valsa la pena affrontarle.
Probabilmente ancora di più che con Tokyo anno zero, primo romanzo della trilogia e probante prova di lettura anche per i più scafati, sorgerà la tentazione di lasciar perdere: si riducono (forse) di un po’ onomatopee e flussi di coscienza tradotti in frasi prive di punteggiatura che avevano contraddistinto quella lettura, ma sorge un filone stretto parente del paranormale che fa un po’ da cornice al romanzo. Al centro, un attentato-rapina (realmente accaduto) in una banca compiuto con un composto chimico e un approfondimento storico sullo sviluppo di armi batteriologiche negli anni Quaranta su sponda giapponese ed americana, una indagine poliziesca ed una più tangenziale alla spy sory, i faticosi racconti di una sopravvissuta e uno stile narrativo che mescola brani di lettere, pagine di diario, interventi giornalistici, racconti in prima e in terza persona, il tutto senza soluzione di continuità e in una sorta di puzzle di cui si fa fatica a ricostruire immagine di partenza.
Una città – e una nazione – ancora scioccata da una sconfitta storica e inaspettata e il confronto fra culture distanti anni luce fanno da sfondo alle pagine più faticose che leggerò quest’anno (ne sono piuttosto sicuro). Ma non ho dubbi sul fatto che sia valsa la pena affrontarle.
March 14, 2011
David Peace follows his spectacular "Tokyo Year Zero" with a book that is, if possible, even more staggering: a twelve-voiced account of a notorious mass murder that took place in Tokyo in 1948. Much has been made of his debt to "Rashomon," and comparisons have also been drawn between this novel and "The Waste Land," but what is most fascinating to me is the way Peace once more draws parallels between the murders that form the basis of the book and the destructive impact of war on those who participate in it. As in the previous novel, the killer here (insofar as he is ever truly revealed) is the product of atrocities committed during WWII on behalf of the Japanese army. Peace makes it clear, however, that the Japanese were far from the only ones engaged in the horrifying experiments with bacteriological warfare; every nation, victor and vanquished, is culpable in the crimes and also in their covering-up. The rot here is all-pervasive. Peace also delivers an interesting meditation on the role of the author-as-medium, especially when the author’s theme is an historical event. This matches the voice here: incantatory, mesmerizing, drawing up the voices of people who have died and who, perhaps, never lived—weaving them together into a story that is as intriguing as it is distressing. This is the second novel in a trilogy; Peace has said that he has an overarching plan for the series, so it should be interesting to see what direction he takes from here.
September 23, 2011
There’s a fascinating story buried in Dave Peace’s latest novel, Occupied City. It is the story of a mass murder carried out in the guise of treatment for a dysentery outbreak in order to rob a bank in post war Tokyo. It is a true story and suggests that the killer may have been from the infamous unit 731 that was developing weapons for biological warfare. The story is somewhat hard to piece together due to the experimental style Peace used in this novel. This might have something to do with reading his first novel, 1974, from The Red Riding series recently, which has a more straightforward manner of storytelling. The 13 different narrators are somewhat of a distraction like some of the experimental prose. It was effective in some sections, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with his American impersonation of Lt. Colonel Murray Thompson writing his letters home to Peggy. That being said I think it might make a better film than novel. I didn’t know the story and didn’t predict the ending.
March 4, 2010
Occupied City is the follow-up to Tokyo Year Zero (one of my fav reads of '08, and a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards). It's 1947, and a man walks into a bank, claiming to be an Occupation Authority, saying that dysentery has broken out in the neighborhood and that everyone in the bank needs to drink his medicine to be protected/inoculated. The result is a mass poisoning (linked to previous war crimes) that it is the center of the novel. We experience the murders (pre, during, and aftermath) from 12 different POVs. The narrative structure is dizzying at times, but always mesmerizing, and like nothing you've read before. Peace is a new favorite writer of mine.
February 7, 2019
Tokyo, 26 January 1948, a man enters the Teikoku Bank, and speaks of an outbreak of dysentery, claiming to be a doctor sent by the Occupation authorities to treat anybody who might have been exposed, he pours clear liquid into sixteen cups and hands them to the bank employees to drink. Within minutes 12 people are dead, and the man disappears with a large sum of money.
This real life case is the basis of Occupied City, the second of David Peaces Tokyo Trilogy, which explores Japans post war turbulence. Although a work of fiction, Peace uses an interesting narrative technique to tell the story. Newspaper reports, government files, witness statements all blend together to reveal a complex conspiracy and cover up, revolving around Japans Biological warfare programme. It speaks volumes about the man who was convinced of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims, survivors and proposed perpetrators themselves. A truely tragic tale.
This real life case is the basis of Occupied City, the second of David Peaces Tokyo Trilogy, which explores Japans post war turbulence. Although a work of fiction, Peace uses an interesting narrative technique to tell the story. Newspaper reports, government files, witness statements all blend together to reveal a complex conspiracy and cover up, revolving around Japans Biological warfare programme. It speaks volumes about the man who was convinced of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims, survivors and proposed perpetrators themselves. A truely tragic tale.
July 1, 2022
I liked how the story changes with each characters voice or ghosts that talk to a “writer”, that’s a clever way to get you to feel for the plot and also the backstory to what was going on at that time. What I found a bit odd was that near the end it didn’t make much sense, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if the stories actually added up to a conclusion, which left me feeling a bit disappointed with the novel. But it is still worth a read and it is incredibly gripping.
November 14, 2024
La trilogía de Tokio aún es más radical y dura que el cuarteto de Yorkshire. Fan.
June 16, 2022
Boh io questo libro non l'ho capito
July 28, 2011
There are times THERE ARE TIMES ---there are times--- when the experimental style of The Occupied City IN THE OCCUPIED CITY WHEN I DEBATED CONTINUING WITH THIS BOOK ---I recognised and admired what a work of art this is--- of Peace's writing AND WISHED THE STORY COULD BE MORE SIMPLY TOLD ---but the narrative can be very dense, and it was slow going---. BUT IT'S VERY DEFINITELY WORTH PERSEVERING WITH. ---so I think I might need to re-read this some time.--- Especially the mind-fucking section near the end which has three different narratives woven together exactly like that (above). David Peace is a brave and committed writer, and this is an excellent book and a story that needed to be told. Maybe he is the new William Burroughs? Anyway: fantastic stuff.
August 21, 2018
Essentially, a failure. In Occupied City, David Peace allows form to overwhelm content to the point the story becomes lost and uninteresting. Peace is not as daring and innovative as he seems to imagine; otherwise, he would have brought more control to this novel. I have seen this before in genre writers who simply can't let an initial insight go--it was common in science fiction writers in the late 1960s and 1970s. The obsession with an elliptical form to the point of indifference. I can see how this might appeal to first year graduate students in a literature program who have just discovered modern and post-modern challenges. But it really is imitative. And the tone is monotonous.
May 3, 2010
I had a hard time with this book. I felt like I was reading a long poem rather than a prose book and I think that may have been what was challenging for me. It didn't really give me anything to hold on to that I usually need-character or plot. The writing is very rhythmic (lots of repetition), descriptive, visual (use of punctuation, capitals), layered and I think the idea is probably to evoke emotion but it just made it confusing for me. I read this for book group, so I'm hoping the power of the group will give me insights that my inadequte comprehension didn't!
February 21, 2010
The second in a promised trilogy about life and crime in Tokyo during the US occupation. This one is heavily influenced by Kurosawa's "Rashomon" which itself was based on short fiction by Akutagawa. Peace has a unique style which one has to experience to appreciate. I enjoyed this one but not quite as much as his earlier "Year Zero".
December 28, 2015
Μου άρεσε πιο πολύ από το πρώτο του βιβλίο. Ήταν ενδιαφέρον ο τρόπος γραφής του βιβλίου και η εξέλιξη της ιστορίας με αυτόν τον τρόπο. Στο τέλος με άφησε με μια γλυκόπικρη (κυρίως πικρή) αίσθηση.
Τι είναι ικανοί να κάνουν οι άνθρωποι και μέχρι που μπορούν να φτάσουν...
Τι είναι ικανοί να κάνουν οι άνθρωποι και μέχρι που μπορούν να φτάσουν...
February 18, 2010
Once you get into the rhythm of the prose, this is a fine novel, certainly better than its predecessor in the triology. That it is based on fact, makes it rather better.
June 18, 2012
Il più interessante e strepitosamente scritto e magnificamente tradotto( Marco Pensante) oggetto narrativo degli ultimi anni.Ogni recensione è impossibile.Leggetelo
March 17, 2017
I found it to be a very cleverly written book, but tough to read. Don't know if it was the story, the context, or the style. But it took me forever to get through.
August 23, 2021
Peace vi strappa il cuore dal petto e gli occhi dalle orbite, ve le imprime sulla carta, vi obbliga ad ascoltare. Non possiamo essere ciechi di fronte alla storia, dobbiamo lottare per la verità
March 24, 2025
12 candele, 12 personaggi, 12 vite, 1 sola storia.
Dopo "Tokyo Anno Zero" David Peace continua la sua trilogia, ambientata nella Tokyo del secondo dopo guerra, con questo secondo romanzo noir ispirato ad un'altra reale vicenda...
É il 26 gennaio 1948, sono le 15:20, e un uomo, che si identifica come il dottor Yamaguchi, funzionario del Ministero della Sanità, entra nella banca Teikoku di Tokyo. Vuole parlare con il direttore ma, non essendoci, viene introdotto al vicedirettore, Yamaguchi lo informa di un'epidemia di dissenteria e che deve somministrare un farmaco alle persone presenti: per undici, dei sedici totali, la morte fu istantanea, quattro sopravvissero. Le indagini sembravano non portare a nulla finché non presero un sospetto: Sadamichi Hirasawa, un pittore spiantato che rubava soldi dalla sua associazione e che per questo fu portato a confessare di essere il responsabile della strage. I sopravvissuti non lo identificarono mai come il dottor Yamaguchi, ma alla polizia serviva un capro espiatorio e Hirasawa fu condannato alla pena di morte, prima e al carcere a vita, dove morì, dopo.
"Tokyo Occupata" racconta questa storia sfruttando un popolare gioco diffusosi nel Periodo Edo, lo Hyakumonogatari kaidankai: il gioco prevede che i partecipanti si dispongano in una stanza a notte fonda e accedano delle candele (nel gioco originale sono 100, qui 12). I giocatori iniziano a raccontare una storia, tipicamente di fantasmi, e alla sua conclusione si spegne una candela. Il gioco procede finché tutte le candele non vengono spente, poi dovrebbe comparire un essere sovrannaturale.
David Peace riprende questo gioco e lo piega alla sua penna: vittime, giornalisti, assassini presunti e veri, testimoni e detective che si occuparono dell'indagine, ognuno di loro racconterà la sua storia, la sua esperienza, inseguendo un'impossibile verità oggettiva. Ognuno ha la propria cifra stilistica: romanzo epistolare, diario, articoli di giornali, descrizioni visionarie, che si mescolano tutte in una prosa ossessiva e martellante. Sullo sfondo una Tokyo che si sta ancora riprendendo dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il raffronto di quello che avvenne nella così detta Fabbrica della Morte a Pingfan (Manciuria).
Un secondo capitolo altresì d'impatto, frenetico e indimenticabile nella brutalità della sua verità.
Dopo "Tokyo Anno Zero" David Peace continua la sua trilogia, ambientata nella Tokyo del secondo dopo guerra, con questo secondo romanzo noir ispirato ad un'altra reale vicenda...
É il 26 gennaio 1948, sono le 15:20, e un uomo, che si identifica come il dottor Yamaguchi, funzionario del Ministero della Sanità, entra nella banca Teikoku di Tokyo. Vuole parlare con il direttore ma, non essendoci, viene introdotto al vicedirettore, Yamaguchi lo informa di un'epidemia di dissenteria e che deve somministrare un farmaco alle persone presenti: per undici, dei sedici totali, la morte fu istantanea, quattro sopravvissero. Le indagini sembravano non portare a nulla finché non presero un sospetto: Sadamichi Hirasawa, un pittore spiantato che rubava soldi dalla sua associazione e che per questo fu portato a confessare di essere il responsabile della strage. I sopravvissuti non lo identificarono mai come il dottor Yamaguchi, ma alla polizia serviva un capro espiatorio e Hirasawa fu condannato alla pena di morte, prima e al carcere a vita, dove morì, dopo.
"Tokyo Occupata" racconta questa storia sfruttando un popolare gioco diffusosi nel Periodo Edo, lo Hyakumonogatari kaidankai: il gioco prevede che i partecipanti si dispongano in una stanza a notte fonda e accedano delle candele (nel gioco originale sono 100, qui 12). I giocatori iniziano a raccontare una storia, tipicamente di fantasmi, e alla sua conclusione si spegne una candela. Il gioco procede finché tutte le candele non vengono spente, poi dovrebbe comparire un essere sovrannaturale.
David Peace riprende questo gioco e lo piega alla sua penna: vittime, giornalisti, assassini presunti e veri, testimoni e detective che si occuparono dell'indagine, ognuno di loro racconterà la sua storia, la sua esperienza, inseguendo un'impossibile verità oggettiva. Ognuno ha la propria cifra stilistica: romanzo epistolare, diario, articoli di giornali, descrizioni visionarie, che si mescolano tutte in una prosa ossessiva e martellante. Sullo sfondo una Tokyo che si sta ancora riprendendo dalla Seconda Guerra Mondiale e il raffronto di quello che avvenne nella così detta Fabbrica della Morte a Pingfan (Manciuria).
Un secondo capitolo altresì d'impatto, frenetico e indimenticabile nella brutalità della sua verità.
June 9, 2013
David Peace is a novelist who occupies an odd space in British literature -- he’s popular enough to receive mentions in the press, and some of his books (the Red Riding trilogy) have been adapted for TV – yet for all that he occupies a radical and challenging space on the borderlines of genre fiction. Much like China Miéville does with science fiction, Peace’s novels can be appreciated both as edgy crime thrillers and as politically-charged texts which challenge existing novelistic conventions.
Prior to this, the only one of his books I’d read was ‘GB84’, which is a deep, discursive and digressive novel about the miners’ strike of 1984. It reconstructed those times from various different viewpoints at every level in society, and while it contained a myriad of shocking (and frequently true) details as well as a host of memorable characters, I found it an incredibly dense and difficult read. It’s an important and rewarding book for sure, but I’m not sure how much of it I actually enjoyed reading.
‘Occupied City’ is a shorter, tighter book, and in some ways it’s better. The setting is very different this time (Tokyo under American governance in 1948) but the concerns are the same. It’s also based on a true story, the details of which are then magnified until it becomes a tale not only about a crime but about corruption at the highest levels of power.
Here’s the story: A man claiming to be from the government enters a bank and carefully administers what he claims to be medicine for dysentery to a group of sixteen employees. Moments later, twelve of them are dead. He leaves with only part of the bank’s money. After an investigation, a man is arrested. Questions remain as to his guilt.
The author’s bibliography at the end of the book explains that the structure of his approach to this incident was partly inspired by Rashomon, and the book shares that famous method of approaching a single situation from many different overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) personas. Each chapter is assigned a different character, and is buffered in turn by weird interludes in which the writer of the book is suspended in a mysterious netherworld, ‘beneath the black gate’.
Prior to the first chapter, they explain how this relates to the form of what follows:
‘...The game begins with a group of people gathering at twilight in the pale-blue light of one hundred lit candles, each covered with a pale-blue paper shade. Each person in turn then tells a tale of supernatural horror and at the end of each tale one wick is extinguished. As the evening and the tales progress the room becomes dimmer and gloomier until, after the one hundredth tale has been told and the last candle blown out, the room is in complete darkness. At this moment it is believed that real ghouls or monsters will appear in the dark, conjured up by the terrifying tale-telling…’
Each chapter is thus represented as the telling and extinguishing of another of these candles – and so the book spirals further and further towards the dark heart of the tale.
The chapters are short and fairly accessible (for a bold reader), but their style often differs violently from one narrator to the next. The first proper chapter describes the killings in the first-person plural voice (‘we’) of the victims themselves, a stream-of-consciousness retelling where the voices are constantly echoing and repeating one another’s words or thoughts or dreams. This is immediately followed by the notes of the first detective, which are delivered in a kind of brusque, clipped shorthand – but with no lack of psychological detail for that. Later, we encounter the notes and letters of a visiting American researcher, and the articles of a Japanese journalist, both of which are relatively straightforward.
But the notes of ‘a second detective’ are perhaps the strangest of all. Here’s how they begin:
‘1. The city is a wound the city is a wound THIS CITY IS A WOUND In the half-burnt pages of my half-destroyed notebooks in the half-said whispers of the half-heard voices IN THESE HALF-REMEMBERED MEMORIES OF THIS HALF-FORGOTTEN DETECTIVE In the Occupied City in the Occupied City IN THE OCCUPIED CITY We uncover the murders of 169 new-born babies in a maternity home in Shinjuku they parade the guilt of 28 soon-dead men in a court house in Ichigaya THEY WILL FIND YOU GUILTY AND THEY WILL HANG YOU, UNTIL YOUR BLADDER EMPTIES AND YOUR NECK BREAKS…’
And so on and so forth. This is pretty much the author operating on full-throttle, and I suspect that for most readers their enjoyment of this book will be tempered by how much of this kind of thing they can tolerate.
I’m fine with it. I think it’s important to realise that the author is using techniques like atmosphere and repetition and dialogue and style in a quite different way to most novelists: he’s one of the few (semi-)mainstream writers today to be interested in the impact of the words on the page, rather than notional words floating through the reader’s brain. At times, his work approaches the status of concrete poetry – and I mean that in a good way.
Lastly, I learned some important things from this book. And I don’t mean ‘learned’ in the squishy novelistic way that really means I just felt warm and fuzzy inside about love or human empathy or anything like that. I learned some actual things about history which are shocking and important – too important to be left to the historians.
I’m going to drop the spoiler tag in here because BIG spoilers.
The connection between this and the murders at the Teikoku bank comes across as somewhat circumstantial in the novel. But it isn’t the author’s intention to give a definitive answer to the question of who exactly committed a crime that occurred over sixty years ago. For me, it was interesting enough that a connection is made – even if it is more a psychic than a literal one.
Prior to this, the only one of his books I’d read was ‘GB84’, which is a deep, discursive and digressive novel about the miners’ strike of 1984. It reconstructed those times from various different viewpoints at every level in society, and while it contained a myriad of shocking (and frequently true) details as well as a host of memorable characters, I found it an incredibly dense and difficult read. It’s an important and rewarding book for sure, but I’m not sure how much of it I actually enjoyed reading.
‘Occupied City’ is a shorter, tighter book, and in some ways it’s better. The setting is very different this time (Tokyo under American governance in 1948) but the concerns are the same. It’s also based on a true story, the details of which are then magnified until it becomes a tale not only about a crime but about corruption at the highest levels of power.
Here’s the story: A man claiming to be from the government enters a bank and carefully administers what he claims to be medicine for dysentery to a group of sixteen employees. Moments later, twelve of them are dead. He leaves with only part of the bank’s money. After an investigation, a man is arrested. Questions remain as to his guilt.
The author’s bibliography at the end of the book explains that the structure of his approach to this incident was partly inspired by Rashomon, and the book shares that famous method of approaching a single situation from many different overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) personas. Each chapter is assigned a different character, and is buffered in turn by weird interludes in which the writer of the book is suspended in a mysterious netherworld, ‘beneath the black gate’.
Prior to the first chapter, they explain how this relates to the form of what follows:
‘...The game begins with a group of people gathering at twilight in the pale-blue light of one hundred lit candles, each covered with a pale-blue paper shade. Each person in turn then tells a tale of supernatural horror and at the end of each tale one wick is extinguished. As the evening and the tales progress the room becomes dimmer and gloomier until, after the one hundredth tale has been told and the last candle blown out, the room is in complete darkness. At this moment it is believed that real ghouls or monsters will appear in the dark, conjured up by the terrifying tale-telling…’
Each chapter is thus represented as the telling and extinguishing of another of these candles – and so the book spirals further and further towards the dark heart of the tale.
The chapters are short and fairly accessible (for a bold reader), but their style often differs violently from one narrator to the next. The first proper chapter describes the killings in the first-person plural voice (‘we’) of the victims themselves, a stream-of-consciousness retelling where the voices are constantly echoing and repeating one another’s words or thoughts or dreams. This is immediately followed by the notes of the first detective, which are delivered in a kind of brusque, clipped shorthand – but with no lack of psychological detail for that. Later, we encounter the notes and letters of a visiting American researcher, and the articles of a Japanese journalist, both of which are relatively straightforward.
But the notes of ‘a second detective’ are perhaps the strangest of all. Here’s how they begin:
‘1. The city is a wound the city is a wound THIS CITY IS A WOUND In the half-burnt pages of my half-destroyed notebooks in the half-said whispers of the half-heard voices IN THESE HALF-REMEMBERED MEMORIES OF THIS HALF-FORGOTTEN DETECTIVE In the Occupied City in the Occupied City IN THE OCCUPIED CITY We uncover the murders of 169 new-born babies in a maternity home in Shinjuku they parade the guilt of 28 soon-dead men in a court house in Ichigaya THEY WILL FIND YOU GUILTY AND THEY WILL HANG YOU, UNTIL YOUR BLADDER EMPTIES AND YOUR NECK BREAKS…’
And so on and so forth. This is pretty much the author operating on full-throttle, and I suspect that for most readers their enjoyment of this book will be tempered by how much of this kind of thing they can tolerate.
I’m fine with it. I think it’s important to realise that the author is using techniques like atmosphere and repetition and dialogue and style in a quite different way to most novelists: he’s one of the few (semi-)mainstream writers today to be interested in the impact of the words on the page, rather than notional words floating through the reader’s brain. At times, his work approaches the status of concrete poetry – and I mean that in a good way.
Lastly, I learned some important things from this book. And I don’t mean ‘learned’ in the squishy novelistic way that really means I just felt warm and fuzzy inside about love or human empathy or anything like that. I learned some actual things about history which are shocking and important – too important to be left to the historians.
I’m going to drop the spoiler tag in here because BIG spoilers.
The connection between this and the murders at the Teikoku bank comes across as somewhat circumstantial in the novel. But it isn’t the author’s intention to give a definitive answer to the question of who exactly committed a crime that occurred over sixty years ago. For me, it was interesting enough that a connection is made – even if it is more a psychic than a literal one.
October 12, 2018
"Occupied City" is David Peace's second in the Tokyo Trilogy, a trilogy of books that uses Rashomon, a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, as an inspiration for structure, rhythm, and language. The story is the telling of a man who identifies himself as a health inspector going into a bank and poisoning everyone there, the investigation, and the capture of the person responsible. This really is quite and easy and short story, but within the 270 pages, Peace takes this story, tells it repeatedly, bending and reconstructing and mixing it into so many different stories. Even though it is the same, it is different with different story structures, different narrators, and different perspectives. This is the Rashomon influence, and for the most part, Peace writes and interesting and mind melting novel. At one point toward the end of the novel, I felt like this must be what brainwashing felt like; the retelling of the story in so many different ways that it becomes ingrained into your psyche and it does not leave. I feel like I will be able to describe the basic story of this novel for years to come because it is such a small plot with so much expansion on the details. There are a few parts that are really boring, a few parts that are really hard to read, a few parts that are repetitive, but I feel like there is a great amount of poetry and rhythm in these parts, that Peace spent a great amount of time making sure that the balance of the sentences and phrases that are repeated over and over are perfect. This is definitely a novel that is style over plot, which is something that Peace does frequently and does well. I also feel like there twelve chapters, the twelve candles, can be read in any order and it would not matter. Even though there are all central to the same ideas and same plot, the sections are interchangeable to some degree. This makes for a novel that just gets higher ranking on artistic and literary merit than on my enjoyment of reading it.
June 7, 2017
Second entry in the Tokyo trilogy by David Peace, this takes a similar approach to the material as the previous novel in that it uses a historical event to make a larger examination of the time. In the last novel, Tokyo Year Zero, we followed a police detective as he searched for a serial killer in post WWII Japan. This time around, it's a couple years later and the story is told from a variety of characters, some not even human, around a mass murder/bank robbery. A lot of the reviews I've seen seem to fall on either this being genius or a pretentious disaster. While I appreciate the experimental writing style Peace uses, I acknowledge there are several moments where I was thinking, I get it, let's move on. If you can get past the constant repetition, shifting narrative, and unorthodox style, you might like this one. For me, I was more interested in the period than the event, and thankfully the story makes more effort to explore the setting, going as far as devoting a chapter to a US military report on chemical weapons facilities and Unit 731 and another from the perspective of the ghosts of the attack. If you're looking for something different, clearly influenced by classic Japanese story-telling, this might be worth checking out.
February 7, 2023
a challenging read, got to be paying attention...once I "got it" I really enjoyed it, although I felt the final chapters (candles) lagged a bit...overall I enjoyed it and will pick up the final book in this trilogy of sorts...
88,243 spirits who were thus denied a final repose with their ancestors, forbidden the memorial rites of the Buddhist dead, and robbed of their last return to their homes - (108)
And for every story there are two sides, two sides at least, for the city is always, already a fiction, this city made of paper, this city made of print - (115)
In this Fictional City, let's pretend...(152)
But these fields of slaughter, these forests of skeletons, they trade not in bravery, trade not in honor, they deal in luck, they deal in death; lucky soldiers and dead soldiers - (156)
So it was time for us to show our hand, so to speak, as we knew would happen. (172)
'Conquered from birth, colonized for life, I have always, already been defeated. Always, already been occupied - (269)
88,243 spirits who were thus denied a final repose with their ancestors, forbidden the memorial rites of the Buddhist dead, and robbed of their last return to their homes - (108)
And for every story there are two sides, two sides at least, for the city is always, already a fiction, this city made of paper, this city made of print - (115)
In this Fictional City, let's pretend...(152)
But these fields of slaughter, these forests of skeletons, they trade not in bravery, trade not in honor, they deal in luck, they deal in death; lucky soldiers and dead soldiers - (156)
So it was time for us to show our hand, so to speak, as we knew would happen. (172)
'Conquered from birth, colonized for life, I have always, already been defeated. Always, already been occupied - (269)
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