‘Tokyo Redux’ just lets the mystery be
On July 5, 1949, Sadanori Shimoyama, the president of Japanese National Railways, left his home in Tokyo on his way to his office. On the way, he instructed his driver to stop at a department store, saying he needed to shop for a wedding gift. But they arrived at the store before it opened, so they drove to a bank and took a circuitous route back to the store. Shimoyama popped out of the car, told his driver he’d be back in five minutes, and went into the store. He never came back.
The next day, his body was found on railroad tracks in a distant suburb. His body had been dismembered, having been hit by a train shortly after midnight. It was officially determined that he was dead before he was hit by the train, but other scientists disputed this.
Some suggested Shimoyama was murdered and his body placed on the tracks. Others argued it was suicide. Shimoyama was under a great deal of stress; JNR was in the process of making large-scale job cuts, and Shimoyama and other railroad executives had been receiving death threats from all over the country.
No official conclusions were ever reached and the case was never solved. To this day, the Shimoyama affair is considered a great mystery and enthralls the public imagination in much the same way the assassination of John F. Kennedy has proved eternally fascinating to Americans.
In “Tokyo Redux” (Knopf, $28), British writer David Peace uses the Shimoyama affair to paint a detailed and credible portrait of postwar Japan under U.S. occupation in the early years of the Cold War. It is the third of a series of literary mysteries set in occupied Tokyo — after 2007’s “Tokyo Year Zero” in which a fictional drug-addicted Japanese police detective pursues historical serial killer Kodaira Yoshio, a former Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least 10 women during and after the war, and 2009’s “Occupied City,” which similarly explored a real crime: the Teigin Incident, in which a man disguised as a public health official murdered 12 bank employees by having them drink poison, telling them it was necessary to protect them from a dysentery outbreak.
Like James Ellroy, to whom he
is compared, Peace weaves a metafictional narrative that suborns historical people and events in the service of his fiction. Peace thrives in the vast gray ocean that lies just beyond the conventionally accepted known facts.
That said, readers used to clever, tidy denouements are likely to be frustrated by Peace, whose novels entertain any number of possibilities while ultimately letting the mystery be. Who killed Shimoyama? It might have been the communists, or the Americans looking to blame it on the communists, or members of the railroad union in league with the communists (or not).
Or it might have been a case of a tired and broken man giving into shame. You don’t read Peace for the way he constructs and solves puzzles; though his secret history of Tokyo is detailed and nuanced and completely credible, you read him for his prose.
The book is divided into three sections, each with its own lead character, whose story is narrated in third person. First is Harry Sweeney, an American detective working for the occupation government, who feels a little like a character out of Raymond Chandler (or a parody of such a character), a Bogart-esque bulldog hailed as “the Eliot Ness of Japan” for his work in breaking up gangs.
Sweeney is assigned to find Shimoyama when he vanishes, before his body is found. Then he’s assigned to solve the case. He does neither, but his journey allows Peace the opportunity to sketch a country in the process of being reborn, with nationalistic forces pushing back against the Americans who see a chance to rebuild Japan as a client capitalist state and mischievous communists looking to take advantage of the shortages to turn the country red.
Sweeney — the name echoes T.S. Eliot’s “apeneck,” a knuckle-dragger in a stylish suit — is honest enough to look for the truth, even though his bosses would be happy if he could frame a commie unionist or two. Meanwhile, his Japanese counterpart is content to call it a suicide; Shimoyama had plenty of motive and opportunity to do himself in.
Next is a section set in 1964, just before the Tokyo Olympics, about a disgraced Japanese police detective turned private investigator looking for a mystery writer who has disappeared with his advance for a book about the death of Shimoyama.
Finally, the third section, set in 1989 as the emperor lies dying, concerns an elder academic and translator (who bears some resemblance to Donald Richie, the American film historian who wrote extensively about Japan and Japanese cinema) who struggles with memories of the Shimoyama case and his perceived inadequacies of character.
As in most of his crime books (as opposed to his football books), Peace begins with a more or less conventional whodunit, weaving the loose ends into a baroque existential drama that hints at the shadow play of governments. (Peace pointedly notes that much of the material on the CIA’s website related to Japan is still “redacted for the period around the death of Sadanori Shimoyama. And only for that period.”)
Peace is a hypnotic writer who taps into unusual rhythms and frequencies. His willingness to leave chords unresolved might make him a challenge to some readers. But he’s among our most musical novelists. And our best.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com