Tokyo Redux
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
The Occupation had a hangover, but still the Occupation went to work.
Tokyo, July 1949, President Shimoyama, Head of the National Railways of Japan, goes missing just a day after serving notice of 30,000 job losses. In the midst of the US Occupation, against the backdrop of widespread social, political and economic reforms - as tensions and confusion reign - American Detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing person's investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ.
Some men go mad, some men go missing .
Fifteen years later and Tokyo is booming. As the city prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight, Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the Occupation period, and now a private investigator, is given a case which forces him to go back to confront a time, a place and a crime he's been hiding from for the past fifteen years.
Some men do both .
Over twenty years later, in the autumn and winter of 1988, as the Emperor Showa is dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American, eking out a living teaching and translating, sits drinking by the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, knowing the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the Showa Era is down to him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Peace's brilliant final entry in his monumental Tokyo trilogy (after 2009's Occupied City) fictionalizes the notorious 1949 Shimoyama disappearance case. Tasked with eliminating thousands of jobs, Sadanori Shimoyama, the president of the Japanese National Railways, is under enormous pressure and scrutiny from a population that's already struggling just to survive when he goes missing. The next day, his remains are found strewn across some railroad tracks. Is it murder or suicide? Harry Sweeney, an alcoholic American detective working for the U.S. occupying forces, is the first to lose himself in the case, which defies easy answers, followed 15 years later by ex-cop-turned-PI Murota Hideki, who sifts through the ghosts of the country's painful past as Japan prepares for the 1964 summer Olympics. Finally, a quarter century later, the story picks up from the viewpoint of Donald Reichenbaugh, an aging former intelligence officer living out his days as a teacher and translator, who's forced to reckon with his own guilt and misgivings about the events of 1949. Peace's dense, baroque style can be daunting, but those who persevere will be well rewarded. Readers will be reminded of James Ellroy at his obsessive best.
