Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
The death of President Shimoyama, the boss of the national railway company was the crime that shocked post-war Japan. David Peace takes this incident and spins out of it a speculative account of how and why he was killed. A story that places an American detective, a Japanese private eye and an ageing academic at the heart of the conspiracy. Encountering it at different times: each will also come face-to-face with secrets, darkness and personal trauma.
David Peace has a knack for using real life crimes to create remarkable works of fiction, as evidenced by his Red Riding series of novels. This allows him to dig beneath the surface to reveal details about a time and place that some would like to see forgotten.
He has done so again in this latest novel, presenting a vision of post-war Japan that owes a debt to some of the more hypnotic elements of film noir. This allows him to touch on themes of power and how it can be abused, the contradictory nature of memory and the compromises a nation had to make to rise from the ashes of defeat.
His prose style gives a nod to both Ernest Hemingway and James Elroy and like both - Peace can sometimes tie his readers in knots. This flaw is more than redeemed by the visceral way he writes about the human spirit in crisis, collapsing under the weight of its own failings and the disintegration of a false reality.
The style and subject matter can, at times, make this book a challenging read; but it is also ultimately a rewarding one.
