North Coast Journal October 4, 2007 : IN REVIEW

October 4, 2007

Dirt heading

Tokyo Year Zero | All My Loving | The Original Patriots

Tokyo Year Zero
by David Peace
Alfred A. Knopf

There’s nothing like an occupying army to stir desperation into the chaos of defeat. Just ask Detective Minami, chief of one of the two murder-investigation units operating in Tokyo during “Year Zero” — the first year after Japan’s surrender to and occupation by the United States.

David Peace, named by Granta magazine in 2003 as one of the best of the young British novelists, isn’t the sort of writer to gloss over grisly reality, whether it’s the gruesome task of identifying the remains of a murder victim or the madness that accompanies the complete destruction of the world in which his characters live.

Tokyo Year Zero might be, in the hands of a lesser writer, a pretty good crime book. On the day of Japan’s surrender (a situation unthinkable to most of its citizens, yet one that circumstance force them to wrap their minds around), the rapidly decomposing body of a murdered woman is found floating in the rancid water-filled basement of a bombed-out war factory. Faced with conducting an investigation while in shock, the detectives — including Minami — watch as an enraged Kempetai officer (the Japanese version of the Nazi SS) executes a Korean slave laborer found in the area, then declares the case closed. Simple enough. After all, it’s not as if one more outrage matters much in the face of all the outrages of World War II.

But a year later, as outrage upon outrage piles up for Minami, the bodies of two more murdered women are discovered in a park. His investigation is hampered both by the premature closing of the first case and by the presence among his superiors of an officer who has plenty of reason to keep the original murder from being linked to the bodies before them.

Minami reminds us, with one of several mental refrains, “No one is who they say they are.” The first mystery of the novel is the identity of the killer, but it is the novel’s second mystery that forms the narrative arc: Not “Who did it?” but rather “Who is it?” Finding the names of the dead women and making sure that they are all accounted for obsesses Minami, but he also is continually haunted by questions of identity and responsibility as he navigates the bombed-out, corrupt landscape of post-war Tokyo while struggling to hold on to his cobbled-together sanity.

He is also conducting an “unofficial” investigation into the murder of an organized crime chief, as well as questioning who is really in charge of the investigation into the women’s murders and what everyone might or might not be hiding — including who they really are. Plagued by plots and counter-plots (some of which actually exist), more than anything else he begins to suspect himself.

Peace adopts a break-neck pace, moving throughout the city and into the countryside. One day bleeds seamlessly into the next as the repetition of Minami’s thoughts and the passage of time by seconds (“chiku-taku,” the sound a clock makes ticking away) propels the reader along with him down a road that can only lead to destruction — because, quite simply, rubble is all that’s left of Minami’s Tokyo. The new city that rises in its place will never be what Minami seeks.

Tokyo Year Zero is a creditable murder mystery/police procedural, but the real power of the novel is in all the other tales of disintegration Peace threads throughout the detective story to form an indictment of both the defeated and the occupiers. This, then, is a city that doesn’t need crime to destroy it; war is enough.

— Kel Munger, a staff writer for the Sacramento News & Review

All My Loving
directed by Tony Palmer
Isolde Films

Director Tony Palmer’s examination of the world of rock ’n’ roll in 1968 serves as a fascinating time capsule. Broadcast on the BBC 39 years ago, All My Loving, “a film of pop music,” was not shown in the U.S. and hasn’t been released on DVD until now.

There was a lot going on in pop music in England in ’68: The Beatles had just released their masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Cream and The Who were taking the country by storm. As he explains in a recent interview included as an extra on the DVD, Palmer’s entrée into the rock world was through John Lennon, who he’d met a few years prior. The Beatle wanted to see rock get the serious attention it deserved, and introduced Palmer to the major players on the scene from Paul McCartney to Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.

Judging by the documentary’s psychedelic style, one might guess that Lennon may have turned Palmer on in other ways as well. Utilizing mind-bending special effects, rapid-fire editing and juxtaposition, Palmer crafted a kaleidoscopic mosaic of words and sound.

After a very British “ex-Tin Pan Alley publisher” longs for the good old days when songs had better melodies and lyrics, McCartney opines that “pop music is classical music of now.” Later Palmer cuts abruptly from Hendrix in full feedback mode, throwing his guitar towards a bank of amps, to an “ear specialist” warning of the danger of exposure to loud music. We get author Anthony Burgess bemoaning the dearth of aesthetics in modern pop, while Donovan dreams of a cultural Renaissance.

In between talking heads we see snippets of Cream, Pink Floyd, The Who and others in concert, and now and then a jarring reminder of current events that helped shape the music: the flash of a protesting monk on fire, or a child covered with burning napalm. As “Yellow Submarine” plays on the soundtrack — “as we live our life of ease ...” — the film cuts from a Beatle on the bow of a boat to now famous footage of a Vietnamese police chief executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a shot to the head.

I imagine viewers from different g-g-generations will relate to the film differently. For baby boomers, it will serve as a flashback; those younger will get a snapshot of a seminal time in rock history.

— Bob Doran

The Original Patriots: Northern California Indian Veterans of World War Two
by Chag Lowry
Self-published

In Ken Burns’ new documentary series about World War II, which began airing on PBS Sept. 23, only one Native American voice is included. When the series was first announced last spring, there were none at all. After public protest and a quick reedit, Burns added two Latinos and a token Indian to the 15-hour documentary. America’s “first citizens,” it seems, are still the last to be included.

But now, thanks to Eureka-based author Chag Lowry, the experiences of many Indian World War II veterans from Northern California have been preserved. In his new book, The Original Patriots, Lowry interviews 60 veterans (men and women), many of whom said they would have declined to speak on the record to anyone else. (Lowry had greater access since his great-uncle, Leonard Lowry, is the most decorated Native American soldier in U.S. history.)

The Original Patriots begins with a gloss of Native American history from the Gold Rush up through World War II. From the 1880s to the 1930s Indian children were torn from their families, sent to boarding schools throughout the state and re-educated. They were forced to learn English and punished for speaking their native languages. Most of the vets interviewed attended such schools.

From the beginning, it’s clear that The Original Patriots is more than just a compilation of war stories. In the books numerous interviews, Lowry plumbs the vets for information about Native American culture (about languages, ceremonies and native crafts); he asks them to talk about their boarding school experiences; and he tries to understand how they were able to selflessly serve a nation that had failed again and again to serve them. In his introduction, Lowry notes that during the Gold Rush, the federal government paid bounty hunters between 50 cents and five dollars, for the heads, hands or other body parts of Indians in an effort to address “The Indian Problem.” However, a century later, Native Americans were giving those same things up voluntarily in the theaters of war in Europe and the Pacific. Over 44,000 Native American men served in World War II. No other ethnic group made a greater per capita contribution than they did.

Given the book’s format, it’s probably not something you’ll read from cover to cover. But if you’re patient, there are fascinating moments to be discovered from a close reading. For example, when asked about the Holocaust one veteran said, “You want to know what I think about that? I think about the American Indian — he went through a holocaust too, and they never made a big deal about that. They still don’t.”

The book is strongest when Lowry gets the vets to reveal how their Native American identity informed the way they perceived and interacted with the world at large. Still, regardless of how demoralizing their experiences were at times (many veterans recounted stories about not being served in some bars when they returned home after the war because Indians and dogs weren’t allowed), all of the veterans in the book are surprisingly, and deeply, patriotic. The Original Patriots is not only an invaluable collection of candid oral histories which, had they not been recorded, might have been lost forever, it’s also an important supplement to mainstream accounts of World War II that have consistently failed to include Native American voices adequately.

Local public television station KEET-TV (channel 13) has produced a local documentary based on The Original Patriots, which goes a long way to filling some of the gaps in Ken Burns’ series. The KEET production features three of the men interviewed by Lowry; it premiered last weekend, but will repeat on Thursday, Oct. 4, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 6, at 3 p.m.

To order a copy of The Original Patriots visit www.originalpatriots.com.

— Japhet Weeks

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