
Purchase
Knopf
September 2007
On Sale: September 11, 2007
368 pages ISBN: 0307263746 EAN: 9780307263742 Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
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