Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2009

David Peace is a tough bugger to enjoy. His prose is knotty, claustrophobic, obsessive to the point of monomania: constantly repeating, repeating, full of endless repetition and CAPITALIZATION. “IN THE OCCUPIED CITY, I hear boots in the mud, I hear sirens in the sky. But I am falling again. In the Occupied City, people are asking me my name. I am still falling. In the Occupied City, I do not know my name. For I am falling…”

This is the second book in Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy, set in the capital in the immediate aftermath of WWII. The first volume, Tokyo Year Zero, followed the investigation of an obscure serial killer case, but Occupied City picks a far more famous incident. In January 1948, a man posing as a health official poisoned the entire staff of the Teikoku Bank in Shiinamachi on the pretense of inoculating them against dysentery, killing 12 people. The person who ultimately confessed to the crime, an artist by the name of Sadamichi Hirasawa, was arrested based on circumstantial evidence, and many have since questioned his guilt.

Peace is one of them. In Occupied City, he delves into the conspiracy theories surrounding the incident, in particular a supposed link with Japan’s experiments in biological warfare, and Allied complicity in the subsequent cover-up.

It’s a thorny and complicated tale, and Peace takes the unusual step of placing himself right at the center of the action. The novel opens with a second-person narrator running through the streets of Tokyo with the “manuscript of / the book-to-come; / this book that / will not / come— / This unfinished book of unsolved crime.” Using a technique that you’re unlikely to find on the syllabuses of many undergraduate creative writing courses, the author proceeds to conduct a séance in which the spirits of people directly and indirectly involved in the case are summoned to recount their sides of the story.

The victims, killer and police all make an appearance, but so do a journalist, a local gangster, and an American and Russian investigating the germ warfare allegations. Their contributions come in the form of first-person narratives, diaries, letters, newspaper articles and staccato notebook entries: “Over 500 suspects questioned / Innumerable leads followed up / All suspects eliminated and released / All leads investigated and exhausted / Back to ji-dõri / Back to meetings / Endless ji-dõri, endless meetings / Endless wastes of time / Endlessly taking us nowhere.”

In the list of sources at the end of the book, Peace says that his approach was inspired by Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short stories “Rashomon” and “In a Grove,” and Occupied City has a similarly inconclusive feel. As the evidence accumulates, the details of the crime become muddier and harder to fathom—unhelped by the fact that more than a few of the characters are quite clearly insane. With each narrator’s retreat back into the darkness, the author is left flailing, still no closer to figuring everything out. “No! No!” he shouts at one point. “What about the trials, the appeals? The conspiracies, the experiments, the war? Help me! Please help me to help you!”

It’s unusual for a writer to broadcast quite so clearly that he’s struggling and out of his depth, but this admission isn’t enough to salvage Occupied City. It’s a messy and madly ambitious piece of work, but one that’s hamstrung by pointless stylistic tics and an ultimate loss of nerve on its author’s part. “Written and abandoned” is how Peace describes the book in its closing lines. It sounds like an apology to his editor—and that’s pretty telling.