A review by rosseroo
Occupied City by David Peace
2.0
David Peace is one of those authors whom I feel I ought to like, but whenever I've picked up one of his books, I just haven't been able to connect with it. I like British crime fiction, but just couldn't get into his Red Riding quartet. I picked this latest book of his (the second in his Tokyo trilogy) up because I find the period of American-occupied Japan pretty interesting, but once again, after 25 pages, I just couldn't take it any more, and I can't see myself picking it back up.
The story is apparently about a real-life 1948 crime in which twelve people were poisoned in a Tokyo bank, and how that may or may not have been related to Japanese experiments with biological weapons during WWII. The compelling subject matter is treated in a framework that is a direct homage to the Ryunosuke stories Rashoman and In A Grove. The book presents twelve narrators, each telling their own stories in a variety of formats (cryptic diary entries, redacted memos, newspaper articles, interviews, rambling stream of consciousness, etc.), resulting in a multilayered narrative. This is an interesting approach, but Peace's execution of it falls way to far over on the experimental end of the spectrum for me, sacrificing coherency and flow in the process. I'm not adverse to the hard work required by experimental literature (I made it through House of Leaves, for example), and I understand that Peace is deliberately working with an impressionistic palate, but this particular effort descends into incoherency.
To be sure, others will find it compelling stuff, and more power to them, but it's not my cup of tea. For a gripping story set in postwar Japan, I'd rather reread Akira Yokimura's excellent novel One Man's Justice. For non-fiction about the bank murder case, I'd turn to William Triplett's The Flowering of the Bamboo, and for more on Japan's biowarfare program, I'd check out books like A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, and Unit 731 Testimony.
The story is apparently about a real-life 1948 crime in which twelve people were poisoned in a Tokyo bank, and how that may or may not have been related to Japanese experiments with biological weapons during WWII. The compelling subject matter is treated in a framework that is a direct homage to the Ryunosuke stories Rashoman and In A Grove. The book presents twelve narrators, each telling their own stories in a variety of formats (cryptic diary entries, redacted memos, newspaper articles, interviews, rambling stream of consciousness, etc.), resulting in a multilayered narrative. This is an interesting approach, but Peace's execution of it falls way to far over on the experimental end of the spectrum for me, sacrificing coherency and flow in the process. I'm not adverse to the hard work required by experimental literature (I made it through House of Leaves, for example), and I understand that Peace is deliberately working with an impressionistic palate, but this particular effort descends into incoherency.
To be sure, others will find it compelling stuff, and more power to them, but it's not my cup of tea. For a gripping story set in postwar Japan, I'd rather reread Akira Yokimura's excellent novel One Man's Justice. For non-fiction about the bank murder case, I'd turn to William Triplett's The Flowering of the Bamboo, and for more on Japan's biowarfare program, I'd check out books like A Plague upon Humanity: The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45 and the American Cover-Up, and Unit 731 Testimony.