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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A dark crime novel set in post-war Japan that only gets darker and more disturbing as its protagonist becomes more and more unhinged. (  ) rutabega | Nov 6, 2009 |  This was a quite disturbing book but was incredibly well written - a quite different style. The style was very effective in pushing home one the conflicting emotions and mental state of the main character. The plot was complex and until the very end I had little idea as to who the real perpetrator really was. The edition I read had some odd past tense issues -- don't know if this was because it was translated from Japanese. Would definitely recommend this. (  ) TigsW | Oct 31, 2009 | An interesting premise (police detective in post-WWII Tokyo) that is botched by its pretentious attempts that manage to land it into several hateful literary genre categories: 1) historical fiction that appears to solely exist for the author to show off extensive period research much to the boredom of everyone else who hasn't written a thesis on the topic; 2) reams of gratuitous stylistic narrator-going-crazy prose; 3) un-illuminating crime gore. And I'm sure I could name more if I had bothered to read more, but I didn't. Crazy narrators are only worth it if the crazy is the subject of the novel, or provides them with insight otherwise inaccessible- this falls into neither of those categories. (  ) kaionvin | Aug 19, 2009 | This is a mystery set in 1946 Tokyo. I just couldn't get into it. It's told in the 1st person, but every other line is the narrator's thoughts which is like 1st person-1st person. I don't know, just seemed like overkill and 300 more pages of it did not seem appealing. francomega | Jul 18, 2009 | I made several valiant tries, but I could not progress more than a couple of chapters into this book. The incoherent style and unpleasant subject matter made it unreadable to me. (  ) MuseofIre | Jul 7, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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From “British crime fiction’s most exciting new voice in decades” (GQ) comes an electrifying novel that revisits a series of shocking crimes committed in post–World War II, bombed-out, American-occupied Tokyo.
On August 15, 1946—the first anniversary of the Japanese surrender—the partially decomposed, raped, and strangled bodies of two women are found in Shiba Park. More murders will soon be uncovered: women killed in the same way, and, it becomes clear, by the same hand.
Narrated by the irreverent, despairing yet determined Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Tokyo Year Zero tells a fictionalized story of the real-life hunt for “the Japanese Bluebeard”—a decorated Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least ten women amid the bleak turmoil of post-war Japan (“one huge sea of displaced persons . . . one minute here and one minute gone”). And it is the story of Detective Minami: chasing down, and haunted by, memories of atrocities that he can no longer explain or forgive.
Unblinking in its vision of a nation in a chaotic, hellish period in its history; of the rawness of emotion left in the wake of war; and of the moral and psychological corruption engendered by its aftermath—Tokyo Year Zero is unforgettable, a darkly lyrical and stunningly original crime novel.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)
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