Tokyo Redux

July 1, 2021
A dark, twist-filled mystery, the last in British author Peace's trilogy set in occupied 1940s Tokyo following Occupied City (2009) and Tokyo Year Zero (2007). Veteran crime writer Peace, who (following James Ellroy) has said that he sees no reason to invent new crimes, follows his own precept here, focusing on one of Japan's most infamous unsolved cases: the death in 1949 of the National Railways' first president, Sadanori Shimoyama. Under pressure from the American occupying authorities, Shimoyama was being forced to lay off 100,000 workers, which made him a man both despised and depressed. One morning he was picked up as usual by his chauffeur, taken first to a bank and then to a department store. He said he'd return in five minutes, headed in--and disappeared. Late that night, Shimoyama's body was discovered alongside a rail line, grotesquely dismembered by a passing train. But was it suicide or homicide? Had he been dead hours before, as an autopsy indicated? If so, why did several people spot him that evening--or think they did--near the scene of his body's discovery, wandering and plucking weeds? Peace's intricate retelling/reimagining of the story begins in the immediate aftermath, with a disillusioned, hard-drinking American detective named Harry Sweeney. It then jumps forward to 1964, amid a revived city preparing to host the world for the Olympic Games. There, private investigator Murota Hideki, a policeman during the occupation, searches for an eccentric missing writer who was a loud proponent of the theory that Shimoyama was murdered--and who battles his own demons. Then the book leaps forward one last time, to 1988. There, against the backdrop of the emperor's protracted final illness, elderly American expatriate Donald Reichenbach, a teacher and translator, ends up being the one who must finally unravel, and reckon with the implications of, the now 40-year-old mystery. Sometimes Peace's style overrelies on line-by-line repetition, but the book has a songlike cadence that--thanks both to the riddles within riddles of the so-called "Shimoyama incident" itself and Peace's sure veteran hand with suspense--trundles the reader along with a train's inexorable momentum. A brisk and atmospheric true-crime thriller.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
Peace concludes his celebrated Tokyo trilogy with a bravura blend of complex story and hypnotic language. As in Tokyo Year Zero (2007) and Occupied City (2010), the plot spins off from a real-life incident--in this case, the 1949 death (murder or suicide?) of Shimoyama Sandanori, the head of the Japanese National Railways. The narrative is structured in a kind of three-part harmony, with a different protagonist in each section: Harry Sweeney, an alcoholic cop with the Occupation army, doesn't accept the suicide verdict and, in attempting to prove that Shimoyama was murdered (the real-life case remains unsolved), finds himself submerged in the byways of postwar Japanese politics; in 1964, during the Tokyo Olympics, a private detective, Murota Hideki, is hired to find a vanished writer who had been working on a book about the Shimoyama incident; finally, in 1989, an ailing translator, Donald Reichenbach, is haunted by memories of his part in the events of 1949. The three men's stories mirror one another, as the truth of what happened begins to come clear, only to be obscured yet again. The compelling, contrapuntal plot is given deeper resonance through Peace's incantatory style, awash in Homeric repetition and freewheeling, Joycean stream of consciousness ("He was drunk and the rain was drunk. The city becoming darker, the night becoming quieter, coming darker, coming quieter. . . ."). For those with a taste for Haruki Murakami's and David Mitchell's pyrotechnical wizardry, this is an unforgettably brilliant novel.

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Starred review from August 30, 2021
Peace’s brilliant final entry in his monumental Tokyo trilogy (after 2009’s Occupied City) fictionalizes the notorious 1949 Shimoyama disappearance case. Tasked with eliminating thousands of jobs, Sadanori Shimoyama, the president of the Japanese National Railways, is under enormous pressure and scrutiny from a population that’s already struggling just to survive when he goes missing. The next day, his remains are found strewn across some railroad tracks. Is it murder or suicide? Harry Sweeney, an alcoholic American detective working for the U.S. occupying forces, is the first to lose himself in the case, which defies easy answers, followed 15 years later by ex-cop-turned-PI Murota Hideki, who sifts through the ghosts of the country’s painful past as Japan prepares for the 1964 summer Olympics. Finally, a quarter century later, the story picks up from the viewpoint of Donald Reichenbaugh, an aging former intelligence officer living out his days as a teacher and translator, who’s forced to reckon with his own guilt and misgivings about the events of 1949. Peace’s dense, baroque style can be daunting, but those who persevere will be well rewarded. Readers will be reminded of James Ellroy at his obsessive best.