To coin a cliché, ‘It’s that time of year again’. The depressing spectre of an almost-summer looms large over the British Isles – three months of carrying an umbrella with you at all times as if it were a proto- ID card. If you can brave the threat of Pig Fever at the airports, maybe you’ll escape this vacuum of the mundane and head out East? Maybe out West? Out anywhere else! If your summer strategy does include such a vacation, then you’re going to want something to read whilst you’re being carted out of here, and during your time lounging in actual-sunshine, as opposed to the pseudo-warm that the Daily Express unfailingly boasts as ‘A SCORCHER!’.
Well, why not chance upon David Peace’s latest effort, Occupied City? Clocking in at less than 300 pages, it’s a perfect slim tome for any discerning traveller/reader’s hand luggage. Who could really turn down the prospect of lazing on a beach with a drink-of-choice in hand, and thumbing through an experimental novel about mass murder and biological warfare set in semi-apocalyptic, post-war occupied Japan, a good third of which is almost unreadable?
So maybe Peace shouldn’t start to worry about any possible stigma of Richard and Judy’s Book Club association with this one – that much is clear. Why, though, as someone seemingly on an upwards trajectory in terms of popularity and career momentum has Peace presented us with a book that is, to get down to brass tacks, so incredibly hard to like?
Not many of us can confess to know a great deal about Japan in the period of American occupation after World War 2. In the Western world, that these events ran alongside the beginning of the Cold War and the formation of Israel has meant that they are not widely known in terms of attention at the time and subsequent historical teachings. Occupied City therefore takes this era as a backdrop and places on top of it an infamous murder of 16 bank employees and their family members which has long been seen as a miscarriage of justice, owing to the fact that the convicted – Hirasawa Sadamichi – was thought by many to be innocent. There is a suggestion that the real killer had connections to the program of biological warfare carried out by the Japanese Imperial Army on the Chinese mainland, and further allegations over a sustained period of time that the identity of the true murderer was covered up by the occupying forces. In terms of subject matter, Occupied City is pretty unique for a non-Japanese novel. In striving for some sort of authenticity in its delivery, however, Peace has well and truly fucked up.
There are twelve chapters that make up Occupied City, each of which is written in a different style – from the more commonplace devices of notebook reports, confessions and collections of letters to the less obvious ‘tripartite ramblings of a clinically-deranged detective’ and ‘mind-numbingly tedious nursery-rhyme repetition’. No prizes for guessing which of these types make you want to rip out your eyes. Every chapter is symbolised by a candle in an Occult setting, a kind of séance, and at the end of each chapter we’re back in the room looking at the candles and being introduced to the next piece of the jigsaw – which would be completely and utterly great, if it weren’t that these ‘candle’ sections were overwrought pretentious twaddle. If you need the math on this, 4 chapters are just horrible to read, and all the others have terrible endings tagged on to them. Euuurgggh.
Peace might argue that Occupied City is a gateway novel – it might encourage people to look into and reflect on the life of Hirasawa Sadamichi, and on the terrible atrocities of Biological Warfare testing by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Sino-Japanese War; it certainly is thought provoking. Disappointingly though, Occupied City too often walks the tightrope between ‘challenging’ and ‘self-gratifying’; it’s not a pleasant read, and it’s not necessarily an engaging one. Owing to the various styles and angles that it is written in, the novel never finds a foothold and it isn’t something you can get stuck into and have a good gnaw on. Whilst Peace should be applauded for trying something daring and unique (which this undoubtedly is), isn’t it his job to create something that people will enjoy? Because if it is, then he has most certainly failed.
Any Cop?: Occupied City is truly Peace’s 44 days at Leeds United.
Cedar J Forrest
Bookmunch 
Why would it be his job to create something to “enjoy? Is that the writer’s task? Can we really “enjoy” Beckett’s Trilogy? That era in Japanese history wasn’t exactly “enjoyable” and Peace gets it spot on – the novel is told from differing viewpoints, different voices, to mirror the schizoid and fractured nature of Tokyo and Japanese society at the time. Rather than be aligned with Alan Sillitoe and James Ellroy, as Peace has been in the past, he is now closer to Robbe-Grillet, Guyotat, and Artaud – none of whose novels I would set out to enjoy but I would – as Occupied City did – expect them to challenge me.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20090802a1.html
..not that Artaud wrote novels… I meant in his use of language… I thought after the success of The Damned Utd, Peace was very brave to write this novel, he could have rested on his laurels, sent his publisher a more formulaic crime novel, but he didn’t, he pushed the form and structure of the novel… Not many writers do that these days…
Cedar J. Forrest, you are obviously a very intelligent person. I was working on a novel about the same murder case as Tokyo Year Zero. I started in 2002. It was taking too long. My problem, I found out later, was that I was trying to write. I thought there should be proper sentences here and there. What a dope I was. If I had known I could get away with this “overwrought pretentious twaddle” and repetition, I could have knocked it out in a couple of days, beat Peace to the punch and had a laurel to rest on.
David Peace couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag.