u003cbu003eA novel about one of history's great unsolved mysteries, by Britain's most original writer.u003c/bu003eu003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003ciu003eThe Occupation had a hangover, but still the Occupation went to work.u003c/iu003eu003cbru003e u003cbru003e Tokyo, July 1949, President Shimoyama, Head of the National Railways of Japan, goes missing just a day after serving notice of 30,000 job losses. In the midst of the US Occupation, against the backdrop of widespread social, political and economic reforms - as tensions and confusion reign - American Detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing person's investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003ciu003eSome men go mad, some men go missing.u003cbru003eu003c/iu003eu003cbru003e Fifteen years later and Tokyo is booming. As the city prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight, Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the Occupation period, and now a private investigator, is given a case which forces him to go back to confront a time, a place and a crime he's been hiding from for the past fifteen years.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e u003ciu003eSome men do both.u003c/iu003eu003cbru003e u003cbru003e Over twenty years later, in the autumn and winter of 1988, as the Emperor Showa is dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American, eking out a living teaching and translating, sits drinking by the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, knowing the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the Showa Era is down to him.u003cbru003e u003cbru003e 'Another typically brilliant and idiosyncratic neo noir from one of our finest novelists. A murder mystery set in 1949 Japan during the US occupation it has all of Peace's usual flair for language and characterization with an additional delicious layer of Pynchonesque baroque conspiracy. I loved it.' - Adrian McKinty
