TOKYO REDUX

The third in David Peace’s Tokyo trilogy of crime novels got a distinctly mixed response from critics. Tokyo

Redux concerns what the Japanese call the ‘Shimoyama incident’: the death of Shimoyama Sadanori, the first head of JNR (Japanese National Railways), whose body was found dismembered by a locomotive in 1949. For the Guardian’s Tanjil Rashid, it was, like its predecessors, a brilliantly strange and vivid portrait of post-war Japan, an ‘allegory of transformation’, and ‘metaphors for the way historic violence haunts a city in search of a new identity, a tension that imbues everything with “the stench of the past, the noise of the future”.’

In the Observer, Anthony Cummins was also full of praise. ‘Although you don’t need to have read the first two books to enjoy Tokyo

Redux, it lands harder if you have, not least during an eerie sequence revisiting the protagonist of Tokyo

Year Zero. Peace can be an uneven writer, but he’s somewhere near his best in this powerful, overwhelming novel, in which genre excitement steadily gives way to the uncannier frisson of being plugged into a current of secret knowledge.’

But Peace’s prose style didn’t work for Michael la Pointe in the TLS who found it ‘excruciating’ – an odd mixture of underwritten and overwritten which conveyed little of the atmosphere of Tokyo itself. Houman Barekat in the Times thought it verged on ‘hammy’: ‘Some motifs recur so frequently one starts to wonder if he’s doing it for a bet: a handkerchief is produced, and a face wiped, on no fewer than 35 occasions, and there’s a remarkable amount of sighing – I counted 77 instances.’