What the Writer Found There: David Peace's Occupied City

Abstract

This essay seeks to understand the writing strategies and structures that David Peace uses in Occupied City, the second novel of his Tokyo Trilogy set in the American occupation period (1945–52). Focusing on the (still unsolved) historical crime of the Teikoku Bank mass murders of 1948 and its linkages to the Japanese army's Unit 731 wartime experiments with plague and germ warfare in China—war crimes that were covered up by the Americans—Peace sustains Artaud's notions of plague and theater as he uses spirit mediumship within implicit textual figurations of the Rashōmon complex (as medieval tale, as modernist literary icon Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's retelling, and Akira Kurosawa's occupation-era filmic allegory) to stage multiple haunted and contesting testimonies about these unjustly repressed and unresolved crimes of war and postwar.