Tokyo [Paperback]

Mo Hayder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2005

Student Grey Hutchins has come to Tokyo because of an obsession. Vulnerable and on the edge, she is searching for a fragment of film supposedly taken during the notorious Nanking Massacre in 1937 when the Japanese murdered 300,000 civilians. Some say the film doesn't exist. The only man who can help is a survivor of the Massacre. Immersed in his books and wary of strangers, this man will at first have nothing to do with Grey. Increasingly desperate, she accepts a hostess job at an exclusive nightspot catering for businessmen and gangsters, and it is here she comes to the attention of one particular man. Ancient, wheel-chair bound and guarded by a terrifying nurse, it is rumoured he relies on a strange elixir for his continued well-being - an elixir others want, at any price...With its heady atmosphere of overt violence, lurking fear and sexual tension, "Tokyo" grabs the reader and refuses to let go until its shattering final pages.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Hayder's horrible ability for making you fear for your life is a very modern achievement.' Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

The author of the acclaimed bestsellers BIRDMAN and THE TREATMENT, Mo Hayder was born in Essex. She left school at 15 and subsequently worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, Tokyo club-hostess, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Vietnam. She now writes full time.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (February 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553814621
• ISBN-13: 978-0553814620
• Product Dimensions: 4.3 x 1.3 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,231,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A thrilling, if not chilling, suspense story, May 10, 2006

By 

Mark Bridgeman (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tokyo (Paperback)

I was recommended this by my brother, who described it as one of the more moving books he'd read last year. I didn't find it to be quite up to the level he put it at, but nevertheless it was a fascinating, and at times heart-stopping, read.

The book follows `Grey', a young British girl with too many social anxieties to mention, who travels to Tokyo to confront a Chinese professor (Shi Chongming) who, she believes, possesses a film of the Nanking massacre (where Japanese troops murdered thousands of Chinese civilians when they invaded the city).

The books is split between Grey's naration, and Chongming's war-era `journal' (which is written in such detail, one wonders where he found the time when he was weak from hunger and escaping with his wife from Nanking). The writing is suspenseful, but laboured in parts - Hayder tells a captivating story, and the twists are certainly suspenseful, but don't expect it to scale literary heights.

Would I recommend this? Oh yes - if you like chillers and thrillers, this will be right up your alley; and you may, like my brother, be touched by it. Just don't expect a classic.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intricate and well-crafted thriller, December 16, 2008

By 

J. Shurin "carnivore" (London) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tokyo (Paperback)

Tokyo is an eerie thriller from English author Mo Hayder.

The protagonist is Grey, an unconventional English tourist, who has flown to Tokyo in search of a missing film about the Nanking Massacre of 1930. Her one lead is the mysterious Professor Shi Congming, one of the massacre's survivors. The book is largely told from Grey's prespective in the 'present' of the 1980's, with occasional glimpses of the past, as recalled by Professor Shi.

Hayder does a very good job of maintaining the delicate balance between the past and present. This is not an airport thriller, in which two intrepid (but robust) academics find the Lost Secret of the Inca-Bible-Judas-Machine and put an end to a Global Conspiracy. Instead, everyone in Tokyo is motivated by small, human (or horribly inhuman) and, critically, personal reasons. Finding the lost video won't save the world, but, as the reader learns from the outset, it would mean a lot to Grey.


Although Grey encounters Professor Shi immediately upon arriving in the city, he's not obliging of her demands to start sifting through the horrors in his past. While he deliberates (often in the form of flashbacks), Grey is forced to wait. Left to her own devices, the lost Grey immediately sinks into the level of the Tokyo underworld. She moves to a strange, abandoned house, filled with other lost souls, and gets a job as a hostess in a Yakuza-populated nightclub. In both places, she encounters many of the denizens of the author's fruitful and disturbing imagination - a Japanese madam who pretends to be Marilyn Monroe, a truly horrific serial killer known as 'The Nurse', a crippled Yakuza lord and a foxy American waiter with a penchant for the bizarre.

As fascinatingly random this collection of oddities is, the great mystery, however, is Grey. Despite the first-person prespective, the reader knows very about the book's protagonist. In fact, for the first half of the book, the reader is only presented with more and more mysteries and allusions. However, as Tokyo rolls towards conclusion, more and more of Grey's past is unveiled - why she's in Tokyo, what happened to her, and, most critically of all, why that film is so very important.

Hayder's progressive reveal of Grey's past is delicately done, and is easily the most impressively crafted part of the book. Grey is a strange bird (no pun intended) and initially quite difficult to understand - by keeping Grey as mysterious as possible, Hayder teases the reader into following along. By the climax, Grey is officially an empathetic character, allowing Hayder to briefly take the spotlight off of her, and throw in a bit of much-needed action to break up the book's tension.

1980's Tokyo and 1930's Nanking never come to life as environments. Grey (in Tokyo) and Professor Shi (in Nanking) are so wrapped up in their own actions that the rest of the setting never comes to the fore-front. With Professor Shi, this is neatly done. The horrors of the Massacre are oft-alluded to and rarely seen - a nicely written bit of terror writing that keeps things interesting. With Grey, it is more of a disappointment. Her immediate surroundings (the house, the club) become Grey's entire world - she's so alienated from the rest of Tokyo that the bulk of her story could be staged anywhere in the world.

Tokyo is a disturbing thriller with a finely-crafted and extremely tense plot. Whereas threatening to destroy the world is easy and commonplace in horror fiction, it is much more impressive to write a novel detailings the terror suffered by a single person. In Tokyo , Mo Hayder succeeds.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking, April 18, 2006

By 

Dinovitch "Dino" (Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tokyo (Hardcover)

I read this book a year ago and gave it as a present to a couple of my friends. This book is very exciting, beautifully writen, with a lot of attention to history and detail. It's one of the best thrillers I have ever read. Everybody who reads it is 'captured' by this book (except the person who gave it one star...). A must read. And a compliment to Mo Hayder!