Tokyo Year Zero

There’s something of the nagging fine-tuned circling of a shark about Peace’s prose. I can imagine his fractured repetitive staccato prose style will alienate about 50% of readers but I loved it. It’s the kind of writing you feel compelled to speak aloud to get the precarious rhythmic grace of it. I......more

I itch. I scratch. I write a review. Gari-Gari. In the smoke-filled bar, in a dark corner of cyberspace, where people are too interested in noir novels to care about the real world, I tell the man across from me that the book is one part mood, one part madness, one part stylized crime novel. What do......more

David Peace has a very distinctive way of writing. Short staccato sentences, often repeated throughout the text, that create a menacing music. At times I found this tremendously effective, at others a little irritating. It's the story of a Japanese police detective's attempt to solve the case of two......more

This is another one of those books that a middle aged white man had no business writing, and yet he pulled it off. Who knew? Maybe not all old white men are terrible? I will have to do more research on that. The reason I’m saying this is because it’s a novel taking place in a postwar Tokyo, among th......more

this book is depressing, it´s disturbing, it shines a certain light on Japan, that one tends to ignore, if one is a Japan-Fan, as I am. Why should one read this book? Because it´s a literary and psychological diamond. From the beginning the reader is stuck in the head of the protagonist and that is......more