42. "Tokyo Year Zero" by David Peace

David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero is hallucinatory, hypnotic, rhythmic, both repetitive and elliptical. Set in Tokyo in 1946, a year after the Japanese Emperor surrendered to the Allies, the novel and its characters occupy a liminal space: The living mingle with ghosts; past collides with present; the refrain No one is who they seem runs through the text. Tokyo has been bombed to rubble; atomic bombs have decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki; war criminals reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs, mobsters, and cops.

Against this backdrop, the narrator, Inspector Minami, finds himself on the trail of a serial killer who is raping and strangling young girls. Plagued by fleas, obsessed by his mistress and/or the murdered girls, haunted by memories of what he saw and did as a soldier in China, paced by the ticking of his watch, Minami struggles to identify skeletons of dead girls and connect them to a killer who knows too much about Minami's own secrets.

The climax seems rushed and a bit confusing as Minami surrenders to madness--madness possibly based in his genes, in wartime atrocities he committed, in the losses he sustained, in the crimes he's investigating, and/or in his conflict to keep track of his own disparate and often amoral identities. This is not an easy read, and Peace's approach requires some effort on the reader's part, but the result is well worth that effort.