From the author of "Tokyo Year Zero "("Astounding," "Los Angeles Times Book Review"), a fierce, exquisitely dark novel that returns us to post-World War II occupied Japan: a "Rashomon"-like retelling of a murder (based on an actual event), its aftermath, and the hidden wartime atrocities that led to the crime.
On January 26, 1948, a man arrives at a bank in Tokyo, assigned by Occupation authorities, he explains, to treat everyone in the neighborhood who might have been exposed to dysentery. Soon after ingesting the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, the other four unconscious, and the man has fled . . .
Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives. One of the victims speaks from the grave. We read the increasingly mad notes of one of the case detectives, the desperate letters of an American occupier, the testimony of a traumatized survivor. We meet a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an "occult detective," a Soviet soldier, a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell.
"Occupied City "immerses us in an extreme time and place with its brilliantly idiosyncratic, expressionistic, mesmerizing narrative. It is a stunningly audacious work of fiction from a singular writer.