James Meek writes:

Peace, who has lived in Japan since 1994, adopts a highly stylised structure for his new book, partly based on two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke: ‘Rashomon’, about an old woman who steals hair from corpses at Kyoto’s Rashomon Gate, and ‘In a Grove’, in which the murder of a samurai is described in different ways by different witnesses, altering our perception of the events and of truth. In Occupied City the mental journeys made by the writer-character during his research have placed him in a kind of Dantean underworld, with truth as his quest rather than love. He reads about an old Japanese ghost-story game, played with as many candles as storytellers, where, after each participant has told their story, a candle is snuffed out and the room grows darker. He finds himself in a place in Tokyo called the Black Gate, where a medium is holding a seance version of the game, with 12 candles. One by one, the medium channels the testimony of 12 participants or sets of participants in the Teikoku Bank poisonings and the Unit 713 story, which become the book’s chapters. The stories begin and end with the murder victims; in between we hear from two of the detectives who investigated the case, the convicted culprit, a gangster businessman, and Soviet and American biowarfare specialists, among others.

(LRB 6 August 2009)

Faber | hardback 275 pp. |ISBN: 9780571232024