barbara fister reviewed Tokyo by Mo Hayder
Review of 'Tokyo' on 'LibraryThing'
5 stars
An unusual book, weaving together the first-person stories of a man and a woman, one Chinese, one English who have little in common except they both have had their lives changed by the Japanese rape of Nanking, a historical moment of inhumanity that was little known in the West until Iris Chang published her book about it in 1997. The Chinese man in this novel kept a diary of the horrific events as he tried first to ignore the peril, then help his pregnant wife escape the city after the Japanese have occupied it and begun their slaughter. Years later, he has the only existing copy of a film that the Englishwoman wants to see. She travels to Japan, obsessed with verifying something she read in a book about a particular horror, and tries to persuade the man, who now lives in Japan, to show her the film. He, in …
An unusual book, weaving together the first-person stories of a man and a woman, one Chinese, one English who have little in common except they both have had their lives changed by the Japanese rape of Nanking, a historical moment of inhumanity that was little known in the West until Iris Chang published her book about it in 1997. The Chinese man in this novel kept a diary of the horrific events as he tried first to ignore the peril, then help his pregnant wife escape the city after the Japanese have occupied it and begun their slaughter. Years later, he has the only existing copy of a film that the Englishwoman wants to see. She travels to Japan, obsessed with verifying something she read in a book about a particular horror, and tries to persuade the man, who now lives in Japan, to show her the film. He, in turn, asks her to help him expose the secret of an elderly Yakuza who takes a mysterious medicine to preserve his life, something she may have access to since becoming a hostess at a nightclub that he frequents. I found this a fascinating story, and though I worried it might exploit a truly dreadful event for the purposes of entertainment, I didn't find it manipulative or sensationalist. In fact, I suspect the author was so haunted by Iris Chang's book (the novel is dedicated to her) that she felt compelled to write about it in the form of crime fiction. The writing is compelling, and the two stories interleaved so that they come together well. Some of the images drawn from historical accounts of the Rape of Nanking are likely to stay with me for a long, long time.