Occupied City, By David Peace

Blood and beauty from a dark side of Japan

Who hasn't hidden shameful volumes at the bottom of the box when carrying books down to the second-hand shop? In my case, a few years back, the ladies at my local Oxfam would have found beneath the lacklustre bestsellers a furtive stash of texts on Japanese war crimes. I acquired them when I lived in Tokyo, convinced that understanding the dark heart of Japan's wartime behaviour was a necessary precursor to understanding the modern country.

Some of the books gave me nightmares (especially those with photos). They had to go. But it all came flooding back when I read the first of David Peace's astonishing, appalling Tokyo trilogy, Tokyo Year Zero. Peace – surely the trendiest writer alive thanks to The Damned Utd and Channel 4's adaptation of his Red Riding sequence - deconstructed a man, a city, a country and a history. He has done it again in the even more audacious Occupied City.

Peace doesn't simply examine wartime Japan's dark heart. He punches through the rib cage to rip it out, vivisect it, and write page after hallucinatory page in its hot, black blood. A novelisation of real events, Tokyo Year Zero was set in 1946 and stripped back the investigation of a series of rapes and murders. Behind the crimes were yet more crimes – committed by the Kempeitai, Japan's wartime military police.

Occupied City is set in 1948 and explores the infamous Teigin Bank Case, a robbery effected by the mass poisoning of 16 people, 12 of whom died. Behind the atrocity are yet more atrocities – committed by Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare division headquartered in Pingfang in northern China.

Peace lived in Japan for 15 years, and his writing is saturated with Japanese sensibility. Tokyo Year Zero deployed Japan's idiosyncratic giseigo and gitaigo (onomatopoeic or symbolic language) to great effect. In Occupied City, single voices speak in interwoven strands; there is rhythm and repetition, like a chanted sutra. The final chapter is a recasting of the Noh drama Sumidagawa. For pages at a time, literal meaning is subordinate to sense impressions.

Somehow, Occupied City is a gripping crime story, too. The man found guilty of the poisonings, a painter named Hirasawa Sadamichi, was so unconvincing a culprit that Japan's execution-happy justice ministers refused to sign his death warrant. In truth, the killer almost certainly had links to Unit 731.

Peace deftly does not unveil the full horror of the Pingfang "death factory" until he has exposed the (at best) complacency and (at worst) complicity of the Occupation authorities in concealing its activities. The leaders of Unit 731 were granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for research data.

There's still one book to come in the Tokyo trilogy. I dread to think what Peace will put into it. But my copy of Occupied City won't be going anywhere near a second-hand bookshop.