Tokyo Redux

Summary

A thrilling postmodern noir about the real-life disappearance, in 1949, of one of Japan’s most powerful figures, and the three men who try—and fail—to crack the case.

Tokyo, July 1949. The president of the National Railways of Japan vanishes. As American and Japanese investigators scrambled for answers, the case went cold—and it remains unsolved to this day. In Tokyo Redux, celebrated crime writer David Peace channels drama, research, and intrigue into this strikingly intelligent fictionalization of one of Japan’s most legendary murder mysteries.

Spanning decades, Peace’s novel reveals how the lives of three men all come to revolve around the same mystery. Starting in American-occupied Tokyo, where tension and confusion reign, American detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing-person investigation for General MacArthur’s GHQ. Fifteen years later, as Tokyo prepares for the global spotlight as host of the summer Olympics, private investigator Murota Hideki—who was a policeman during the Occupation—is confronted by this very same case, and is forced to address something he’s been hiding for more than a decade. And twenty-plus years after that, as Emperor Shōwa lays dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American eking out a living in Japan teaching and translating, discovers that the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the era is now in his hands.