Mo Hayder: Tokyo

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

I can scarcely believe I've read another Mo Hayder novel. The last one, Birdman, left me sickened and terrified, its violent darkness creeping around in my head for ages. So, how sick is it that I couldn't resist this next one? Although, to be fair, it looked as if it was more ... historical, perhaps. Less based on the kind of insane gruesomeness of your average urban serial killer.

But Hayder is irresistibly drawn to the dark side, so for her, a historical novel is no harmless romp: she gives us Nanking in 1937, as the Japanese Army rampages through the vanquished Chinese city,
massacring around 300,000 civilians. An army of serial killers.

The novel is split between that story, told through the diary entries of a hapless survivor, and the modern-day story of young Englishwoman Grey Hutchins, an enigmatic, waif-like outcast obsessed (for reasons that eventually become clear) with Nanking. Grey comes to Tokyo to find a man she believes has a film of a particular incident that occurred during the Nanking massacre. The man she's after is Shi Chongming, an elderly Chinese academic now working at the University of Tokyo — the writer of those diary entries.

Chongming is not pleased to meet Grey — he's terrified of revisiting the past, although we don't entirely understand why (beyond the obvious reasons) until very near the end of the book.

Eventually, the pair do a deal: if she can find out something for him, he'll let her see the film. However, that discovery takes her right into the heart of Tokyo's most feared mafia-type gang, headed by a terrifying old man, Fuyuki, who may have in his possession the elixir of life. He is guarded at all times by his even more scary Nurse.

Meanwhile, Grey is carving out a life for herself in Tokyo (so to speak). Befriended by handsome but probably psychopathic Jason, she gets a job in a hostess club and begins to unravel the mysteries of her own bizarre childhood and strange sexuality. What are those ugly scars on her abdomen, and how, more than 60 years later, do they relate to Nanking?

Some of the plot strands are contrived, but Hayder wrenches them all together in her own time. She's incapable of resisting the macabre, so be prepared: lurid terror and grisliness are here in large helpings and, depending on your constitution, you may prefer never to know why Grey is warned "don't going to eat any meat" at Fuyuki's house. Incredibly tense, although not as obscene as Birdman, this will keep you reading until that time of night when every creak of the house seems to announce that Nurse is here to get you, too.

Bantam Press, $34.95