Tokyo Year Zero David Peace Faber & Faber, 355pp, £16.99

Over the past decade, David Peace has carved a niche for himself writing gritty novels based on real events, suffused with violence, grief, noirish anxiety, in clipped, repetitive, minimalist prose. "The Red Riding Quartet", based on the Yorkshire Ripper, was followed by Peace's take on the miners' strike, GB84; and even The Damned Utd, an ostensible departure dealing with Brian Clough's brief stint as manager of Leeds, is notable for its depiction of bitterness and obsession (Clough's 44-day reign was not a happy one).

Peace's new novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is the first of a prospective trilogy providing a switch in focus from Yorkshire to Japan, where its author lives. It is August 1946 and Japan is in tatters. Tokyo is broiling, stinking; raw sewage spatters streets pocked with emaciated prostitutes and empty market barrows. Everyone is obsessed with food, plagued by boils, lice, loosening teeth. It is the Year of the Dog, though no one much cares. The corpse of a pregnant collie lies in the gutter with its stomach split open, surrounded by "half-rotten but fully formed puppies"; those dogs still alive have developed a sinister "new-found taste for human flesh". The occupying Americans are referred to simply as the "Victors"; the "Losers" aren't even allowed a decent seat on the train. Over one million urns containing ashes of the war dead lie unclaimed.

Amid the carnage, police detective Minami is trying to go about his day job. He is in no better state than Tokyo, afflicted by a constant hammering - both the clanging of a city rebuilding and the thumping of his conscience. Flashbacks to his time in the army suggest that he hasn't been a model human being. The guilt wells up viscerally, gaudily: "Black bile, brown bile, yellow bile and grey." His hair greys before his eyes; he catches the haggard visage of a colleague and realises, "I am looking into a mirror." The same thoughts run (in italics) round and round his mind: about a former mistress ("I think about her all the time"); his self-hate ("Idiot. Idiot"); his shattered country. He itches. A lot. In Japanese: "Gari-gari gari-gari gari-gari gari-gari."

Peace lays the repetition on thick, opting for mimesis rather than more metonymic or ornamental literary tropes. The narrative is first-person, a window into Minami's fizzing brain. To describe the pounding Minami hears, Peace writes: "Ton-ton ton-ton ton-ton ton-ton ton-ton." Other recurring tonal intrusions include two types of rain (dripping and pelting), the sound of running water and the ticking of clocks. The style is orchestral, composed of blocks and motifs. It can be irritating and lends itself well to skimming (not to mention parody). Then it seizes the reader, stamping its mark. We are left with a very keen sense of 1946 Tokyo and the mind of one of its victims. Unsubtly, improbably, Peace renders the person and the place. This is what literature is supposed to do.

Tokyo Year Zero is also sustained by some well-paced, tightly constructed plotting. Minami is investigating the murder of a teenage girl. His inquiries reveal further homicides and suggest the work of a serial killer. But Minami is haunted by his own gruesome memories, and it is hinted that he might somehow be involved. So, too, might he lose out in the latest purge at the police station. His comrades watch each other with suspicion; office politics are complex, menacing. Even more menacing is Senju Akira, the local mafia boss. Senju wants to know who killed his predecessor. In return for information, he keeps Minami in yen and sleeping pills. "We lost a war. We've all got secrets," Minami tells him. "Not like yours, inspector," Senju replies.

Setting a detective novel in a country wracked by violence and the ghost of violence is discomfiting. If brutality has been normalised, what constitutes a violent crime? In postwar Japan, everyone from the GIs to the Japanese street cleaners seems to be guilty of something. Every man, that is. Women are simply there to be abused, further implicating the men. At one point, Minami grabs a prostitute in an alley. The rape is depicted with customary bluntness: "I screw her cunt and then I come." We have been following Minami - sometimes warily, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes sympathetically - from a chat with his wife about their ill daughter to his grovelling in front of Senju. The rape, when it comes, doesn't seem particularly shocking. When a suspect later confesses to (some of) the murders, his wife defends him, bewildered: "but he's just a normal Japanese man". This, it would seem, is the problem.

"An era is defined by its crimes," Peace has commented. "We have to ask, 'Why wasn't it the Cornish Ripper?'" Tokyo Year Zero is based on a real series of murders that perhaps said as much about postwar Japan as Peter Sutcliffe did about 1970s Yorkshire. Then again, killers can strike anywhere - even in Cornwall - and it is more than just the murders that make Peace's Tokyo distinctive. His book also reminds us what a miracle Japan's rapid recovery really was. It will be interesting to see whether the follow-ups, covering the seven years of allied occupation, attempt to foreshadow this. It is hard to see Peace doing optimism.

Toby Lichtig is an assistant editor at the TLS

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