 |
|
Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Paul French
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Tokyo by Mo Hayder
MO HAYDER has in TOKYO crafted a thriller that encompasses the horrific Nanjing Masscare of 1937, modern Tokyo with its hostess bars, rampant development and criminal underworld along with the story of an abused English girl, Grey, seeking answers to her childhood miseries.
Grey arrives penniless in Tokyo on the trail of a long lost and forgotten film documenting the atrocities perpetuated by Japanese troops in Nanjing in 1937. Her life so far has been one of isolation, institutionalization and academic retreat. Now she needs to find the lost film to prove herself that she is not insane as her doctors had told her. Her quest takes her to a Tokyo university and the reclusive Chinese professor Shi Chongming, outwardly a sociologist but inwardly on a decades-long quest himself to find answers to what happened in Nanjing during the war. Linking the quests of Shi and Grey is Fuyuki, Tokyo's leading Yakuza gangster now wheelchair bound and dying but still able to order assassinations and hold riotous parties.
MO HAYDER has already proved she can write a thrilling page-turner with her debut novel Birdman. Reviewers were clearly impressed likening her to, among others Patricia Cornwell (the Kay Scarpetta novels), Lynda La Plante (the Prime Suspect series) and Thomas Harris (Red Dragon). Her second book, The Treatment, also got rave reviews. Both novels featured the psychologically tortured Brit police detective Jack Caffery.
Now Hayder has deserted Britain to write about Asia, though here she has some background having previously been an English teacher in Vietnam as well as a hostess in a Tokyo club. However, like many other writers who use the Japanese capital as a setting Hayder's Tokyo is not a precise one but more of a phantasmagoria of the modern neon-lit city.
Grey arrives in Tokyo to find Shi Chongming unwilling to talk about the past. To support herself while she tries to convince him to trust her she ends up working in a hostess club. The triangular relationship between Grey, Shi and the Yakuza boss Fuyuki who frequents the hostess bar forms the crux of the mystery that will free Shi and Grey from their own personal demons and also reveal the shocking truth behind the Nanjing Massacre denied by many.
While the truth is slowly revealed in modern day Tokyo, Hayder interposes the diary of Shi as a young man trapped in Japanese occupied Nanjing in 1937. The horrific events he encounters there are also slowly unraveled until the two stories merge in a dramatic conclusion.
With her third book, Hayder has proved that even by moving away from her previous characters and locations she can still produce a page turning thriller.
Paul French
14/07/2004
|
Paul French is author North Korea: Paranoid Peninsula. He writes regularly on Chinese and North Korean economics and politics for a wide variety of publications. |
| |
|
