Aug. 15, 1945 — Emperor Hirohito broadcasts Japan's acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the body of a woman is found in the flooded basement of Dai-Ichi Naval Clothing Department women's dormitory. A year to the day after these events, police discover the bodies of two women in Shiba Park — Detective Minami investigates.
"Tokyo Year Zero," based on the true case of Yoshio Kodaira, an ex-Imperial soldier who raped and murdered 10 women during the postwar chaos, is no mainstream police procedural — David Peace works in darker territories. There is a nod to Akira Kurosawa's "Stray Dog," the crime fiction of Seicho Matsumoto and Akimitsu Takagi, and Akira Yoshimura's "One Man's Justice," but "Tokyo Year Zero" is more a literary autopsy of occupied Tokyo; it delves within the city's body and surgically dissects its blackened heart.
With its incessant pace and relentless bleakness, "Tokyo Year Zero" is, at times, an uncomfortable read — the reader sweats with Detective Minami, itches and scratches with him. We feel his hunger, his mania. The repetitious prose invokes the rhythmic pulse of a city rebuilding itself. The writing is claustrophobic and apocalyptic.