THE NARRATOR AND hero of Tokyo Year Zero is a detective who cheats on his wife, gets his best journalistic contact nailed to a door by gangsters and sleeps with prostitutes whom he refuses to pay. Not your typical funster, then.

But context is everything and the context here is Tokyo, 1946, 18 months after its fire-storm; hell on earth, made still more hellish by the especial agony for the Japanese of living with dishonour. Living – trudging, running, queueing for streetcars, begging for cigarettes, vomiting endlessly from anxiety – is the first thing that makes Detective Inspector Minami notable if not likeable: “I am alive . . . I am one of the lucky ones.”

The second is his tortured effort to solve the murders of two women raped and dumped in a park. Why bother when tens of thousands of bodies still lie under the ash and rubble left by Curtis Lemay’s B29s? Part of the answer is about scraping up honour from dishonour, and part is contained in this simple factoid: in postwar Tokyo every murder was assigned a room at the nearest police station, a red banner to be displayed outside it and a team of detectives commanded to work night and day until they solved it.

This being a David Peace novel, you can take such factoids to the bank. He prides himself on his research, and Tokyo Year Zero contains 13 years’ worth – the time he has lived in Japan, first as an English teacher, now as standard bearer of a rugged-yet-feverish style that we may end up calling East Asian neo-noir.

His canvas is densely factual, but the novel is a feat of prodigious and intense imagination. Stylistically, it can be irritating, more Birtwistle than Britten (“I itch. I scratch. I itch. I scratch.”), with constant interruptions from Minami in the form of an italicised interior monologue. But the time, the place, the smell and the sheer pity of defeat are brilliantly evoked. This is conviction fiction of a high order.

TOKYO YEAR ZERO by David Peace

Faber, £16.99; 368pp

Buy the book here £15.29 (free p&p)

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