Tokyo
Ratings5
Average rating4.2
Set in Tokyo, the heart-stopping new bestseller by 'Thumping Good Read' Award-winning Mo Hayder.Student Grey Hutchins has come to Tokyo because of an obsession. Vulnerable and on the edge, she is searching for a fragment of film supposedly taken during the notorious Nanking Massacre in 1937 when the Japanese murdered 300,000 civilians. Some say the film doesn't exist. The only man who can help is a survivor of the Massacre. Immersed in his books and wary of strangers, this man will at first have nothing to do with Grey. Increasingly desperate, she accepts a hostess job at an exclusive nightspot catering for businessmen and gangsters, and it is here she comes to the attention of one particular man. Ancient, wheel-chair bound and guarded by a terrifying nurse, it is rumoured he relies on a strange elixir for his continued well-being - an elixir others want, at any price ...With its heady atmosphere of overt violence, lurking fear and sexual tension, TOKYO grabs the reader and refuses to let go until its shattering final pages.
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The main narrative of this novel follows an English girl who arrives in Tokyo to visit an old Chinese academic about his time in Nanking, when the Japanese devastated the city. Having studied the atrocities for years, she is aware of rumours of worse, and wants to prove she didn't make it up.
Initially she is put off by him, and takes up work in a hostess bar to cover he costs in Tokyo. When he learns of this, the professor offers her a deal - his story for something he wants - from a Yakuza boss who she has met at her bar.
The second narrative of this book is the 1937 diary of the old man - Shi Chongming, which he is reading now for the first time in 53 years. It tells of his city of Nanking just before the arrival of the Japanese, then during the massacre.
It basically reads a chapter of each narrative, combining at the end as the protagonist learns the secrets. Along the way we also learn her history, and how she finds herself linked with the story.
This is a fast moving, easy to read suspense novel, with the basics of Nanking all based in researched scenarios. Even the basis for the ‘situation' in the novel has some basis in fact, which the author describes in the Authors Note at the end of the book. Explaining that more would be a definite spoiler!
Solid 3/3 stars.
