“Closing Time”: Discordant Temporalities of Japan's Postwar in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy

Abstract While David Peace's epic Tokyo Trilogy concentrates on the years after Japan's defeat in 1945 and the city of Tokyo as a classic crime scene, this essay proposes that the traditional pursuit of detection recedes in importance compared to the time of the “postwar,” a new category of periodization initiated by the military occupation, which would become the temporal scaffolding of the renewing of Japanese society. This category was situated at the temporal crossroads of a newly imagined “democratic” Japan and the legacy of a ruined prewar landscape, still signifying the power of the past in the present. In Peace's narrative, the effort to solve the crimes is constantly mediated and played out in the tensions between “Old Japan” and “New Japan,” resulting in a repetition of what Japan had been since its modernization, a reservoir of contemporary noncontemporaneity.