Customer Reviews

Tokyo

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

"Tokyo" is situated in 1937 and 1990. Its content is weird, its plot brilliant, its story a page turner right up to the final page, its atmosphere compelling, its language beautiful. Deep down it is about the difference between ignorance and evil, about how past and future swing back and forth, and about the value of rational thought vs. traditional folk superstitions and portents about impending disaster.
"Tokyo" is about the Nanking Massacre of December 1937, when between a handful (Japan) and 3- 400.000 Chinese civilians were massacred by Japan's Imperial Army. Unspeakable atrocities took place. This book follows two characters through whose eyes, in 1990 in Tokyo, two obsessions come to an end. They both lost their only child, but in different times and circumstances. They write this book.
As a child, the isolated, poorly-socialized girl Grey finds an orange-colored book about the Nanking Massacre in her parents' bookcase. She reads about a Japanese officer bayoneting a baby alive from its mother's belly. A later, crucial, but at the time poorly understood event in Grey's life occurs at age 13. Its aftermath condemns her to lengthy psychiatric care, where she is considered insane for what she has done.
Once out of care, she enrolls in Asian Studies at the University of London. She copies and soaks up everything known about the Nanking Massacre and acquires a working knowledge of spoken and written Japanese and Chinese. Her aim is to find evidence for what she read in the lost orange book, Japanese soldiers bayoneting pregnant Chinese women with the baby surviving. When she finds the name of a person who may have filmed evidence, she sells everything she owns for a ticket to Tokyo to question this person.
The second writer's name is Shi Chongming, an old Chinese visiting professor of sociology at Japan's top Todai university. In 1937, he was a rational thinker, married with a superstitious, pregnant wife. He kept a diary throughout the events his wife has warned him about and which he chose to ignore. During the coldest, hungriest days of December 1937, he recorded what he saw, heard and did to save his pregnant wife, who was right after all... His diary extracts from 1937 intermingle with Grey's accounts from 1990, when she finally meets a much older Shi Chongming, and then a third main character named Junzu Fuyuki, now in a wheelchair, kept alive by a secret medicine, protected by an army of bruisers and cared for by the Nurse, Miss Ogawa, who is neither a Miss nor a nurse...
Fuyuki was a sadistic devil in Nanking in 1937 and still a devil in Tokyo in 1990 as a Yakuza godfather. He seems to live forever thanks to an elixir whose formula Shi Chongming wants to know and market to save his own Chinese university from bankruptcy. If Grey can procure it, he will show or even give her the film that haunts her, proves that she is not insane...
This is a great piece of writing based on lots of research and with a great support cast: weird American Jason, who can read girls' minds; Ms. Strawberry, an elderly Japanese Marilyn Monroe look-alike, who employs Grey in her exclusive men's club as a hostess; her Russian colleagues; and the enormous old house Grey, Jason and the Russians live in, its overgrown garden and its mysterious ground floor, locked up, out of bounds.
This book is a triumph of evocative and creative writing with plenty of potential for a movie, or better, a series of 4 or 6 installments. Highly recommended thriller.

Beware - this book is exactly the same book as "The Devil of Nanking" by the same author. For some reason this book is out under both titles. So, buy either Tokyo or The Devil of Nanking...!!

Whichever copy you read, it is excellent.!

Brilliantly written, I was left sitting with the book in my lap for some time after I had finished it, just thinking.

Probably though, I should begin with a token warning of how graphic this book is. Some parts will leave you a little sickened to the stomach; more so because it is based on true fact.

The book has two stories running through it, which are as intoxicatingly interesting as the other. The first, we are introduced to a young woman who travels to Tokyo trying to discover the truth to what she has believed she has read. She has been told she is crazy, and that no such thing occured, yet she is desperate to find out for herself and prove herself right.
The second story which runs along side, is of a young japanese man and his wife, and their life before and during the Nanking invasion.

The two stories meet up horrifyingly towards the end, and melt into one. You suspect, perhaps, where the story will end up...but there is still a surprise waiting.
Brilliant characters, and excellent historic references.

Best of all the Hayder books I have read yet. Couldn't put it down.

This book was extremely difficult for me to get into. The prose was leaden at first and I almost gave it up. But the good reviews I'd read made me curious enough to continue. It got easier to read, but for the most part this author's style was not for me. There were two exceptions:

One is that the author can write suspense. There were some sections of the book with hefty doses of it, and it was done well. Every so often I'd hit one, and it's what kept pulling me along toward the end.

The other is at the end, when the explanations fall into place. It was well done, and affective (yes, that's the spelling I wanted).

Still, for the most part, the plot and characters are what I consider to be pulp. As such, it's entertaining to read, outrageous, titillating, extreme in order to capture attention, but it's not realistic. None of the side characters are to be mistaken for real humans; they're defined by their eccentricities, not anything I could identify with, except perhaps fear. The plot seems just this side of a sci-fi conspiracy novel, though by the end you see it is not.

So all in all this was a mixed bag. Once I realized that this was a dressed-up pulp novel, I sat back and enjoyed it. I'm glad I read it, but a reader should go into it not expecting literature, but rather just a good tale that it may take a little while to get into.

I'm a big fan of Mo Hayder and Tokyo was not a disappointment. I finished it in just over 24 hours - couldn't put it down.

The only reason I gave this 4 stars rather than 5, was because I felt there were a few 'holes' in the plot, that maybe needed filling in a little more than they were. Jason was an odd-ball character, but I felt he could have been 'fleshed' out a little more so that we understood why he was the way he was. Similarly, Grey's ignorance and background with her parents was never really dealt with so that we couldn't really empathise with why she reacted so badly to her 'condition' (don't want to give anything away to those of you who haven't read the book yet). Similarly, how did she become so entranced by the whole Nanking Massacre? Other than reading a passage from a book her parents owned, it's not really explained more than that. Finally, what was the deal with the Nurse and her special 'technique' of killing people? Grey was shown a distressing photograph of a crime scene, where it seemed the killer must have been very skilled to have carried out the murder in that particular way - this was glossed over and we never really got to the bottom of that either.

Despite the above negatives, I really did enjoy this book - it was a great thriller and did a good job of wanting me to keep reading the next chapter and find out what was going to happen next. The chapters that dealt with the Nanking Massacre it's self in the late 30s was both gripping and distressing at the same time - it's hard to believe that humans can be so barbaric.

I'm off to read 'Skin' next...

The central figure of this ugly, pathetic story is the repulsive and stupid "Grey" who, obsessed by the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese in 1937, goes to Japan in search of a lost film documenting the horrors of what was a case of generalized slaughter of the inhabitants of that city. Grey, throughout the book, reveals herself as a semi-savant through her learning of many kanji, although her rapid progress in spoken Japanese seemed far-fetched to me, and also as a social incompetent, a fool (she allowed herself to be gang-banged at the age of 13 and excused it on her ignorance of sex) and utterly insensitive to the extent that she torments the aged Chinese survivor of those distant events to satisfy her own morbid curiosity about what happened. This connects with cannibalism practiced by at least one (and probably more) Japanese soldier and still indulged in by an elderly veteran of the war and now a powerful and feared yakuza boss. For those of you who delight in such grotesque and ugly fables such as The Silence of the Lambs, this book will satisfy the macabre ghouls alive and well within your souls (?), but for any sane and healthy person it is best avoided. There is such a thing as too much ugliness as well as there being a quality known as good taste. If you want to deal with horror and cruelty, take a look at what American foreign policy and military intervention have caused in the way of human suffering and forget the garbage produced by M. Hayder.

A brilliant book. A great storyline which develops and evolves into an ending that leaves you a little shocked yet satisfied with how it all comes together. The characters in this story are somewhat larger than life, encouraging your imagination to work overtime.

By far the best of Hayder's 3 books so far. Can't wait to read the next.