Introduction: Postwar Japan as Occult History—David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy

This dossier collects four essays on David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy written by scholars of modern Japan—three historians and one anthropologist—as well as a conversation with the author in which he responds to the essays. It is the culmination of a conversation initiated in Harry Harootunian's graduate seminar at Columbia University over a decade ago, when the first novel Tokyo Year Zero (2007) was assigned and discussed. Jack Wilson's appreciation of Peace's historical crime fiction sustained that conversation over the years, and with the publication of the final installment Tokyo Redux in 2021, we decided to take the opportunity to return to the trilogy and consider its critical possibilities for rethinking the history and politics of postwar Japan. The essays pursue these possibilities by focusing on different thematic or formal elements in the trilogy, including the disjointed political temporality of the occupation and its legacy; Peace's unique literary experiments and the myriad influences that he drew upon to write the trilogy including theater, philosophy, and film; the depiction of police power and the historical and political conspiracies they are implicated in; and the trilogy's contribution to a broader genealogy of anti-imperialist cultural practice. And with the dossier about to go to press, we were lucky enough to reach David Peace and invite him to contribute to the project.The title of this introduction plays on an edited volume published in 1993 titled Postwar Japan as History, which announced that the postwar period in Japan had become an object for historical inquiry. In his introduction to the volume, Andrew Gordon (1993: ix) noted that although “the contributors shared a belief that the postwar era in some sense had ended as Japan became a dominant global economic power in the 1980s,” they also “recognized the difficulty of defining the condition called ‘postwar’ Japan or declaring it to have ended.” David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy can be read as a rumination on this “condition,” pursued through the form of historical crime fiction or what Peace calls “occult history,” which paints a dark and conspiratorial picture of the formative years of Japan's postwar settlement. And by extending the trauma and hauntings from the early postwar up to 1989 in the third novel, Tokyo Redux, Peace suggests that this condition did not conclude in the 1980s and still may be reverberating in the new century.1Many of the critical writings on Peace's novels, including those on the Tokyo Trilogy, focus on his literary experiments with the genre of crime fiction, describing his novels as “avant-garde” (Wroe 2008), “intensely claustrophobic” (Cartwright 2010) works of “hypnotic postmodern noir” (Rayner 2010) with a repetitive/rhythmic writing style that “resembles verse more than prose narrative” (Hart 2006). However, as suggested above, Peace understands these literary experiments as a method for exploring the historical and political contexts in which these crimes took place. In an interview, he explains that “because crimes happen to actual people in actual places at actual times in history, the crime novel has the opportunity to ask why such crimes happen to those certain people at certain places in certain times.” Not only does it provide an opportunity, but crime fiction brings with it an “obligation to examine the causes and consequences of crime” (Hart 2006: 559). And since mystery is “the essence of the crime genre . . . that is, who did what to whom and why,” it also determines “what it can do/say/be in political or historical terms” (560).So, what are the “political or historical terms” of Peace's crime fiction? There are some critical writings, mostly British, that have engaged with Peace's historical portrayal of British deindustrialization in the 1970s, its social dislocations, and the rise of Thatcherite neoliberalism in the 1980s, depicted in such novels as his Red Riding Quartet (1999–2002) and GB84 (2004).2 However, the Tokyo Trilogy has not received the same kind of historical-critical reading. In many reviews of the trilogy, the historical complexities of Japan's colonial empire, interwar fascism, the occupation, or Japan's unique place in American strategy during the Cold War are reduced simply to questions related to Japan's experience of defeat and occupation by the United States and the destitution in which the crimes took place (see, for example, Adams 2007). But the bleakness that pervades the trilogy derives less from the contextual settings of the crimes and more from the historical legacies and political implications that overdetermine the crimes and their investigations. This is to say that Peace is crafting a kind of history with particular political valences for understanding postwar Japan—“occult history”—by experimenting with the genre of crime fiction. Thus, we wanted to consider the possibilities that Peace's trilogy presents for interrogating the historical legacy of the US occupation of Japan (1945–52) and the shadow it cast over what Harootunian (2000) has called “Japan's long postwar.” To introduce the essays, I will first situate the trilogy in Peace's oeuvre and how his earlier work has been interpreted. Next, I will discuss the historical crimes that the books are based on, and then I will introduce the essays by focusing on the political significance of Peace's literary engagement with the history of occupied and postwar Japan.Peace wrote the first two installments of the trilogy—Tokyo Year Zero (2007) and Occupied City (2009)—at the peak of critical acclaim for his British novels set in the 1970s and 1980s. His first series, the Red Riding Quartet (1999–2002), brought him to popular attention and landed him on Granta's best young British writers list in 2003, among many other accolades. The quartet is set in north England around the time of the serial murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe—the Yorkshire Ripper—in the late 1970s. Rather than a conventional work of crime fiction, Peace foregrounded the economic destitution and police corruption that allowed Sutcliffe to kill thirteen women before finally being caught in 1981. In an interview, Peace explains that the “novel seems the perfect form to examine what has happened in real life, the things that have deeply affected ordinary people and reflected the times they lived in” (Wroe 2008). As such, the quartet both examines the historical conditions in which Yorkshire Ripper's murders took place and works through Peace's own memories of growing up in Yorkshire.Peace continued to work through this historical period in Britain in two subsequent novels: GB84 (2004), set during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, and The Damned Utd (2006), which fictionalized Brian Clough's short-lived tenure managing the football team Leads United in 1974. By the late 2000s, The Damned Utd was being adapted to film, while his Red Riding Quartet was adapted to television. As Katy Shaw (2022: 2) explains, it was “the intersection of a specific set of circumstances”—namely, “industrial disputes, spending cuts and political movement to the Right” in Britain in 2009, along with it being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the miners’ strike—that “conspired to propel the author and his work into a wider global consciousness.” Wider consciousness, yes, but very much British in source and significance: Peace was celebrated specifically as a British author, and it was his portrayal of the social conditions in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s that prompted discussions of the politics of his novels.3In a conversation with fellow British author David Mitchell—to whom he is often compared—Peace explains that “I've just wanted to try to understand the places I have lived and now live in, and the people I have lived and now live among, and to do that through writing the histories and biographies of those places and people” (Mitchell and Peace 2018). It should be noted that Peace wrote his British crime fiction while living in Tokyo, where he has lived since 1994. He admitted that “it wasn't until I left Yorkshire and England that I was able to write about the times and places I grew up in” (Hart 2006: 565). If the spatial distance from England allowed him to reflect on the historical conditions of his childhood in Yorkshire, his Tokyo Trilogy is as much an attempt to explore the formative historical experience of the occupation period in Japan as it is an exorcism of the repressed history that continues to haunt his adopted home. For example, in another interview (Adams 2009) Peace explains that “Up until the war . . . Tokyo was crisscrossed with canals which were filled in with the ash of the buildings and with the bodies of the dead. Most of the people who were killed were heaped into piles and used as landfill. You are always conscious of that. . . . Or at least I am.”And what are the political stakes of this historical excavation? For British critics, Peace's Red Riding Quartet and GB84 are immediately recognizable, since they engage with historical events that produced the conditions for Britain's current sociopolitical malaise. In one of the more sophisticated readings of the quartet, Mark Fisher (2014: 80) argues that the novels are acts of “exorcism and excavation of the near-past”—namely, the destitution of north England in the 1970s and the conditions that brought Thatcher to power. But this exorcism does not cleanse, heal, or redeem. Rather, Fisher argues, the novels are “driven by the unexpiated suffering of Yorkshire at the end of the 1970s” (82), a suffering conveyed through “incantatory repetitions delaying and veiling plot revelations rather than rushing headlong towards resolution” (80) as would take place in conventional crime fiction. As such, he reads Peace's novels as “hauntology,” in which “it becomes difficult to know what is happening or what has happened” and “at a certain point, it is unclear as to whether we have crossed over into the land of the dead” (81). As Marilyn Ivy explores in her essay, these hauntological motifs can be found in Peace's Tokyo Trilogy as well.Fisher's reading of the quartet as “hauntology” corresponds to Fisher's (2012: 16) periodization of a “cultural impasse” in formation in the 1970s: specifically, the loss of the “capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”4 Hauntology thus becomes a particular cultural expression of this impasse. Read in this way, the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 are mournful reminders that we remain haunted by the world that Reaganism and Thatcherism (“there is no alternative”) inaugurated in the 1980s and an indictment of our failure to imagine a different future in response. No matter what we make of Fisher's theory—and here Jack Wilson's essay should be read as an explicit critique—such a reading poses an interesting historical question when extended to the Tokyo Trilogy. Specifically, if Fisher dates the cultural impasse in which we lost the capacity to “imagine the future” in and around the accumulation crisis experienced in Britain during the 1970s, this then would correspond to Peace's hauntological excavation of that time period. However, what does it mean for Peace to extend hauntology to occupied Japan in the late 1940s?Peace's trilogy is centered on three historical crimes that took place in Tokyo during the Allied occupation following Japan's defeat in the Pacific War and the collapse of its formal empire. At the risk of oversimplification, the United States arrived in 1945 with an unprecedented sense of purpose to completely reform Japan, what was encapsulated under the slogan of “demilitarization and democratization” and informed by, at least initially, American New Dealism. As Harootunian points out in his essay included in this dossier, such a mandate did not inform the Allies’ policies in Germany or Italy, making the Japanese occupation a unique experiment. However, very quickly occupation authorities were alarmed by the rise of a radical labor movement as well as the electoral victories of recently legalized socialist and communist parties. By the time of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, such domestic events were understood as expressions of the threat of world communism and thus as foreshadowing the Cold War in East Asia. By then, occupation policy had taken a “reverse course” and shifted to economic retrenchment, the suppression of radical political and labor elements, and cultivating a conservative hegemony in Japan as part of the United States’ larger containment strategy in East Asia (Cumings 1993; Schaller 1997).5 The three events on which Peace bases the trilogy took place during this transformation—specifically, 1946, 1948, and 1949—and it is the sociopolitical overdeterminations surrounding these crimes that become symbolized in the complex narrative structures of the three novels.Similar to the Red Riding Quartet, the first novel Tokyo Year Zero (2007) is based on a historical serial killer, Kodaira Yoshio (1905–1949). In addition to brutalizing Chinese civilians as a Japanese Imperial Army officer during the 1928 Jinan Incident, Kodaira was arrested for killing his father-in-law in 1932 but was paroled in 1940. Working odd jobs throughout the war, he took advantage of the desperate conditions at war's end to lure young women with promises of food or employment. He is known to have murdered at least eight women in Tokyo and Tochigi, and after being arrested and tried, Kodaira was executed in 1949. Kodaira's guilt was not questioned, but prosecutors and journalists struggled to understand what could have driven Kodaira to such barbarity, with many pointing to his war experiences as nurturing his bloodlust. Tokyo Year Zero follows the police's investigation of Kodaira in 1946, in which the story quickly shifts from investigating Kodaira's murders to exploring the police's own complicity in the history of Japanese empire and war.The second volume, Occupied City (2009), is based on the poisoning of employees at a Tokyo branch of the Teikoku Bank in January 1948 (known as the Teigin Incident). A man claiming to be a public health official acting under orders of the occupation arrived at the bank before closing and explained he was to inoculate employees against a purported dysentery outbreak in the neighborhood. The concoction turned out to be poison, which killed twelve of the sixteen people who drank it. Although some money was taken, the culprit left the bulk of the bank's money, which was in plain sight. Thus, detectives and journalists debated what the motive could have been for carrying out such a heinous crime. Although an eccentric painter named Hirasawa Sadamichi was arrested, his guilt was continually under question, as there was no conclusive evidence linking him to the crime. Indeed, although given a death sentence, Hirasawa sat on death row for thirty-two years, dying in prison of pneumonia in 1987. There is continuing over the with many early police that the crime was out by a or who would have experience such Occupied City is around an author who in as a the of those in the Teigin Incident, including police and occupation among final volume, Tokyo Redux is based on an to Peace's British novel The story on the death of Japan was found on in the early of 1949. had the before on his to At the he was by occupation authorities to one and thus whether committed to the of the or was by communist in or by who wanted to public against and radical Peace explores this and its legacies in three the first following an American official at the time of and death in the second following a in to an author with the and the set in following an American who for the occupation and is haunted by the and its these should make Peace three that are with political and historical significance and thus are for his experiments with the genre of historical crime fiction. For example, in the second and third novels, Peace up two historical events where there were questions about the Teigin or where it was whether a crime had been committed Incident). In the first Tokyo Year Kodaira Yoshio is arrested and in the first of the novel, which shifts the of In other the of is by Peace's of and it is this question and its critical possibilities that the essays in this dossier the first essay, Harry Harootunian the trilogy as place during the of Japan and the formation of a new by the Harootunian that Peace does not reflect on the of the occupation that would as a of the Peace is Harootunian points to the to and in the novels and these as a critical to read the He argues that not only did the of New Japan to Japan, but Japan able to the of as by the a of a social and political . . . in which different histories to with This is by the disjointed that the this in the of crime fiction, Harootunian the that to “the of crime who a of the of social of the the official of Peace's novels are . . . of the police assigned to of the crime” as such, do have a of its does Peace the of police which police and their for of Tokyo Year for example, is to pursue this and more about than with investigating and a as Harootunian He seems more by his fellow police detectives than he is by those his to Kodaira's although the police may of Tokyo Year or the for a of Tokyo of has a of the social in which the crimes took place or a to the of the to which they we how Peace's with the of crime fiction into the larger historical and political questions in the the second essay, Marilyn Ivy a of the second novel, Occupied the complex volume of the trilogy to its conveyed through a and the of that Peace upon for including and theater, among many And although Peace with exploring the conditions in which the Teigin took the story is, as Ivy explains, as a of from the and their that become a kind of attention to Peace's experiments in Occupied City how he has . . . of with the narrative of the of the of and the occupation of with the history of the Teikoku Bank to his own argues that it is not the Teigin murders that is the source of in this but rather history specifically, Japan's and If the first novel, Tokyo Year how “the still the of that which it the war the of Occupied City do not provide the are not a resolution” that a in its And this is not simply historical postwar as essay to the the a literary from the dead” and the and that the history of postwar the third essay, I a to read the trilogy by focusing on the of police and the historical they are produced through the Peace the conventional narrative of historical rather than is, the object of is continually to conspiracies with historical different and that do not but rather or are As such, these of the conventional narrative of and into questions about how police power history through a of or trauma with the larger legacies of Japanese and American in the early Cold War In other the hauntings and in the novels are of the legacies of Japanese empire, war, and American I into a understanding of postwar the essay, Jack brings David Peace's novels into conversation with the postwar Japanese and more cultural experiments in and to what he calls a of anti-imperialist cultural should read Wilson's essay as an explicit of Mark Fisher's of Peace's novels as works of that political example, Fisher And if Fisher (2014: that in Peace's books as a hauntological for these the to which the that the and that the experience of the social of empire is a to an to this by focusing on the living that these that it is in their that we can the possibilities of these from to Peace's many and to the of Andrew and David to the Yorkshire For these cultural do not for historical or and not but rather the that although in the of empire is always up in the of this condition by and that in to an final of this dossier is an edited and conversation with David in which he responds to the essays by the of the occupation the political stakes of writing histories of postwar Japan, and the of historical crime fiction more among other