Policing the Catastrophe: History and Conspiracy in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy

Abstract This essay focuses on the police protagonists in David Peace's Tokyo Trilogy and the historical mediations they perform in the worlds of the novels. It argues that these mediations are generated by the way Peace subverts the conventional narrative structure of historical detective fiction: rather than moving toward resolution—solving a crime—the object of detection is continually displaced to conspiracies with historical and political implications, thereby constituting different temporalities that do not move forward but rather repeat, circulate, or are perpetually delayed. Underlying these repetitions, transmissions, and premonitions are historical-political legacies of Japanese empire, war, and American anti-communist conspiracies, which open toward a critical-conspiratorial understanding of postwar Japan.