Friday, July 6, 2012

TOKYO YEAR ZERO by David Peace

Finished Fr 7/6/12

This novel is based on the true story of Japanese serial killer, Kodaira Yoshio. He was executed on the fifth of October, 1949, and at the time of his death he was forty-four years old, and had confessed to the rapes and murders of ten women.

The novel is a first person account  by Detective Minami who has been assigned with a group of detectives in August of 1946 to investigate a murdered young woman , and soon it becomes clear that she is one in a series of murdered prostitutes who were raped and strangled by Kodaira Yoshio.  Detective Minami is also involved with a local crime boss, Senju Akira, who is after him for information about the killing of another gang leader, and this further aggravates his deteriorating mental condition. Detective Minami is operating under a crushing loss of spirit and extreme depression, and this sets the novel's tone which is abject demoralization.

Although the book is a police procedural, and deals with the investigation and apprehension of  a serial killer, it is more of a documentation of Detective Minami's depressive mental state, and the depiction of the harrowing economic conditions in Tokyo of August, 1946. .

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