It was relentlessly grim up north in 1970s and 1980s Britain, judging by David Peace’s six previous novels, but Japan in 1946 is infinitely grimmer. The first instalment of his new trilogy is set in a bomb-wrecked, postapocalyptic Tokyo where almost everyone is starving, nothing works, native gangs clash with marauding immigrant rivals, the heat is stifling and the occupying American “Victors” are a stabbing reminder of the collective humiliation of surrender.

Detective Minami, the novel’s protagonist, has plenty of his own woes. Driven half-crazy by insomnia, incessant vomiting and itching caused by lice, he’s in no fit state to head a team investigating the killing of two young women. And the need to find money for his family, his mistress and sanity-preserving sleeping pills leads him into a gangster’s clutches. Corrupt, complicit in murder, almost certainly guilty of dark deeds in his army past, Minami is an absorbingly complex figure. He’s cracking up, yet somehow retains a professional flair that produces breakthroughs, but too late to prevent him getting sacked. The novel’s highly crafted verbal texture, however, makes the investigation (based on a real serial-killer case) hard to follow: the most literary of crime writers, Peace mimics his sleuth’s chaotic mental processes by using repeated motifs that include obsessive thoughts, snatches of pop songs and the sounds of scratching ( gari-gari) and hammering ( ton-ton). Many passages are closer to the TS Eliot of The Waste Land and The Hollow Men than to the average whodunnit. You sense that he would see his work being called “page-turning” as an insult.

Peace, who has lived in Japan since 1994, brings postwar Tokyo brilliantly to life. But his distinctive technique (tracing what he calls the “occult history” of the recent past) is stymied here because it depends on readers being familiar with the official version: most people will know much less about Japan under General MacArthur’s shogunate than they do about the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (the subject of Peace’s Red Riding Quartet) or the miners’ strike (GB84), and will be unable to see where the standard account is being challenged. Obvious parallels with the occupation of Iraq apart, it’s never clear why we’re being told this story. Tokyo Year Zero confirms its author’s remarkable gifts, but on this evidence the trilogy it opens looks like a wrong turning.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace
Faber $16.99 pp355
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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