04 July 2021 10:04
An unforgettable and unbearable noise punctuated the background of Tokyo anno zero. With that novel, the British author David Peace inaugurated a trilogy that now Tokyo regained complete (the volumes are published in Italy by the Assayer in the translation by Marco Pensante). Ton-ton, ton-ton, ton-ton… it was the din emanating from construction sites where a city was being rebuilt, the post-World War II Japanese capital, in a country defeated and controlled by the US occupation forces. That ton-ton now returns. Those who have already read the first two “chapters” will find it again. And it will find many characters (American detectives, policemen, crazy writers, ambiguous editors, translators who are actually spies), along with the historical landscape and the anguish. Together with the bad smell of a past that cannot be erased if you have not solved it. Peace, a wonderful writer, has completed his literary project: to renew the expressive potential of the historical novel and the criminal novel at the same time.
In the center of Tokyo regained there is the death, in 1949, of Sadanori Shimoyama. President of the national railways, about to lay off one hundred thousand workers: his body was found on the tracks. The case was never solved and it impacted Japan’s political fate. Peace tells it in three passages that cross the history of the country (1949, 1964, 1988) and correspond to stylistically different parts, but all full of the registers to which the author has accustomed us. Each section of the book reveals a fragment of truth while Peace, page after page, never ceases to propose its moral vision: criminal cases with public importance risk transmitting a collective disease, from generation to generation.
“I confess that after finishing Tokyo busy city (the second volume, ed) I was tired of writing death stories ”, Peace explains to me from Japan, where he lives. “Many aspects – some personal, some not – have made it more difficult to conclude Tokyo regained“. Peace admits that he was slowed down by “overwhelming” preparatory research, because the literature on the Shimoyama case is vast. To give an idea of what this historical episode means for the Japanese, we could compare it to the Matteotti crime or the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. While he worked, and also wrote other books (Red or dead, Patient X), his agent and “closest friend”, William Miller, has died, aggravating a moment of “creative fragility”. In short, ten years have passed and five versions of the novel, “all discarded”, explains Peace. But now the book is there.
The key
The Tokyo trilogy immerses the reader in a postwar Japan, a former ally of Nazi and fascist regimes, tamed but rebuilt on rotten foundations, in the impunity of its war crimes. The key chosen by Peace is to tell cases of crime that actually occurred. “I chose the stories that seemed best suited to understanding the period of the US occupation,” explains Peace. And Shimoyama’s death is exemplary: “In 1949 the occupation had long since lost the ideals inspired by new deal and it had entered the phase of the so-called reverse route: it imposed a drastic crackdown on the trade union movement and the Japanese left, demanded economic sacrifices and mass layoffs. That corpse found on the tracks opened the scene for a radical political conflict. Japan was divided between those who believed that Shimoyama had committed suicide, those who spoke of murder, those who blamed the left and the trade unions, and those who the right ”.
A construction site in Tokyo, in 1964. (Courtesy of the publisher)
David Peace describes Shimoyama as a tragic and isolated figure: “His death changed the course of Japanese history. It brought about the end of the trade union movement as a transforming political force and halted the rise of the Communist Party. It can be said that the left has never really recovered from those events ”. And it remains an unsolved case. Peace studied all available sources. In Tokyo regained every hypothesis is staged – murder, suicide, murder disguised as suicide – but from the novel, which assumes the responsibility of giving an answer, emerges the skeleton of what in Italy we would define a “strategy of tension”: unleashing death and then place the blame on a political or social party, in this case the trade unions, so as to provoke a reaction against the left.
Strategy of tension: the formula convinces the British author who, incidentally, reveals that he deeply admires Leonardo Sciascia. The Sicilian writer, together with Dashiell Hammett and Jean-Patrick Manchette, belongs to a “holy trinity” of left-wing “crime writers” who have always inspired him. “The Moro case di Sciascia is a fundamental essay, and it was a key text for me ”, Peace admits. “In Japan they exploited Shimoyama’s death – a murder, I am absolutely convinced – to discredit the left.” And the role of the Americans? Many are convinced that they materially participated in the murder. Peace’s position, however, is more nuanced: “Some American agencies provided support for Japanese far-right nationalist groups. Groups born before the war, which had committed murders and attacks during the years of the ‘dark valley’ – the militaristic historical period that goes from the end of the twenties to the defeat in 1945 – but which continued to act even after. Probably the Americans limited themselves to facilitating them in the murder of Shimoyama, and then exploiting it to their advantage ”.
Style
This is the theme of the novel. When it comes to Peace’s books, however, we have to face the question of style. Also because each volume of the trilogy features formal innovations. Tokyo anno zero has the claustrophobic, repetitive and percussive language typical of Peace. Tokyo busy city it adds an impressive structure, inspired by the work of the writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Tokyo regained it appears more “serene” in the exhibition (certainly not in the themes), more classic in the use of dialogues, with the intention of showing the characters through what they do and say. There are three different books, whose narrative forms arise from the needs that the individual stories pose.
“In Tokyo regained“, Says Peace,” I have revisited several models of crime fiction. The first section is a tribute to Hammett’s American noir. The second draws on two competing forces within the Japanese detective genre: The burnt map by Kōbō Abe (which in turn is inspired by the first novels of Robbe-Grillet), and the more classic crime novel by Edogawa Rampo ”.
This section also features “elements of the great left-wing crime writer Seichō Matsumoto”. As the third and final section moves towards the spy novel: “It’s something completely original in my work, and I hope it’s a symptom of future paths,” Peace clarifies.
The sources
It is not new to Tokyo regained, on the other hand, the accurate relationship with the sources: it is a typical feature of modus operandi by Peace. In reality, this dialogue between document and invention concerns a significant number of authors that we can identify in a generation matured between the two centuries. All of them educated at WG Sebald’s school. All of them are engaged in the creation of a “new historical novel” which on the one hand puts the twentieth century on the theme, on the other hand combines literature and history, outlining in a transparent way what source and what is invention, and finally experiments with new structures.
Peace fully belongs to this scenario: “Since 2011 I have started teaching at the University of Tokyo. One of my first courses was called ‘Writing History’ and included Sebald, among others. So for many years I have been concerned with how we write history. I think I reached this level of reflection quite naturally after the period Red riding quartet e GB84”.
The questions that Peace continually asks itself are: “How to best tell the stories of our recent past? Is fiction the most suitable form? And what are the structures that more than others question the ‘official truth’ and manage to illuminate the ‘other truth’? “.
“Truth” is a demanding word. Basically, being devoid of a truth to reveal is the raison d’être of literature. Which doesn’t stop you from looking for it, though. This reasoning summons another pillar of Peace, gender: one often gets the impression that the author adopts it as master key to tell, in fact, the impossibility of truth and justice. As if the crime story was the most congenial literary medium to represent the ambiguity of human behavior.
Peace is of course aware of this, and quotes Manchette: “The detective novel is ‘the great moral literature of our time’. Indeed, to be more precise, it is the most suitable form to expose and condemn the evil at the heart of our capitalist system. Too bad that most of the authors of crime fiction refuse this opportunity, preferring to enrich themselves with sadistic and voyeuristic fantasies ”.
Of course, even the pages of the trilogy are steeped in violence. All characters, social or professional groups are violent. As if the aggression shown in the open by a militarist nation had migrated into “nocturnal”, hidden and pathological behaviors. I wonder if there is still a trace of so much inextricable violence in Japan today. But Peace brings me back to the center of the problem, which for him is another. The English writer does not perceive violence in Japan today – “there is less of it than elsewhere” – but he sees it, which is worse, almost everywhere in the rest of the world, and considers it “a logical consequence of capitalist societies, aggravated from the fact that the gap between those who have and those who have not continues to widen. ‘Dog eat dog’ means we eat each other. We are all cannibals, ”he concludes. Difficult to disagree.
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