The first thing that strikes readers of David Peace's latest novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is how noisy it is. On virtually every page, the Japanese capital is realised through appeals to the sense of sound with 'za-za', 'gari-gari', 'chiku-taku' and - most of all - 'ton-ton'. 'People have said to me they find it very annoying, but I really don't put sound into the book to annoy,' says Peace with a smile. 'I just think that life is pretty noisy and there's always a television on, or a radio, or just people talking. There's a wall of sound around us, as well as whatever is going on inside our heads at any point. 'When I was doing the research for the book, people who lived through that period immediately after the war would talk of the reconstruction work - the 'ton-ton' - that's a symbol of the rebuilding of the city, but it also has more sinister aspects for the detective,' he says. 'I wanted to create as accurately as possible what it must have been like to be in Tokyo in 1946, and that includes the smells and sounds.' Tokyo Year Zero, Peace's seventh novel, was published in his native Britain last month. A Japanese-language edition comes out next month. Critical acclaim has been forthcoming, not least from author James Ellroy, with whose work many draw parallels. 'Part historical stunner, part Kurosawa crime film, an original all the way,' Ellroy writes on the jacket. 'David Peace's depiction of a war-torn metropolis both crumbling and ascendant is peerless, and the story itself is beautifully wrought.' The story begins as the second world war ends. As the emperor announces Japan's surrender, two detectives wade through raw sewage in a flooded air raid shelter to recover the body of a murdered young woman. Through the words of Detective Minami the grim descriptions continue as the body count rises. A year later, two more bodies are found in Shiba Park. Minami and his colleagues, many of whom guard secret pasts of their own, hunt the perpetrator at the same time as fighting corruption within the force and escalating violence between underworld gangs, always struggling to find enough food and cigarettes to get through the day. Whereas Minami and most of the characters that populate Tokyo Year Zero are fictional, Yoshio Kodaira isn't. A former soldier, he was executed at the age of 44 at Miyagi Prison, in Sendai Prefecture, on October 5, 1949, after confessing to the rape and murder of 10 women. The two women found in Shiba Park were his victims, but one of them has never been identified: the most police could determine from her badly decomposed remains was that she was about 17 years old and had been killed about July 22, 1946. 'I came to Japan in 1994 and read Tokyo Rising, by Ed Seiden-sticker, which covers Tokyo from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to the death of the Emperor Showa, and there was a brief mention of two bodies being found in a park where the Tokyo Tower was later built, and it really just stuck with me,' Peace says. Peace's first four books, known as the Red Riding Quartet, dealt with the investigation into the killings in Yorkshire, where he grew up, that became known as the Yorkshire Ripper case. The murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe in the 1970s resonate with the Kodaira investigation, he says, although he didn't initially have the confidence to tackle a story set in Japan, partly because of language difficulties. An editor at publisher Bungei Shunju, which bought the Japanese rights to his fifth novel, offered to help with the research and convinced Peace to start work on a trilogy. Tokyo Year Zero is the first part. He has completed the research for the second book, entitled Tokyo Occupied City, which is due out in summer 2009, and Tokyo Regained will be the final title. Both will look at the city through the prism of a crime that shocked the country. 'For Tokyo Year Zero, I talked to some of the people who were in Tokyo at that time and spent a lot of time in the National Diet Library going through English-language newspapers, although there was next to nothing about the cases apart from the 14 days over which the book is set,' says Peace. 'For those days, I wanted to know everything: what the weather was like, the temperature, whether it was raining, so when you read that it was raining in the book, then you can be sure that's what was happening.' Scouring Japanese papers provided details about the availability of food, prices and transportation, while the works of authors and filmmakers, including the early movies of Akira Kurosawa, gave him a feel for the state of a nation that had been beaten and humiliated by the Allies, and remained cowed in the face of the occupation forces. Peace says that he's drawn to dark topics - although he says that some of the scenes in the book 'were not pleasurable' to write. . 'My first four books were about the Yorkshire Ripper and there's the old adage that we write about what and where we know,' he says. 'Unfortunately, I think that crime shines a light on a society, on a time and a place, and if you want to know what a society is like, then crime and people's responses to it are what you need to look at.' The initial print run for the Japanese market has been set relatively high, he says, which is perhaps surprising considering that the novel deals with a period of Japanese history most people would rather not recall. 'The publishers say they will push it in Japan and have told me it's a once-in-a-decade book,' he says with a shrug. 'I hope they mean that in a good way.' Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (Faber & Faber, HK$192)
