''Tokyo'' is a 2004 novel by British crime writer

Mo Hayder Beatrice Clare Dunkel (born Clare Damaris Bastin; pen names, Mo Hayder and Theo Clare; 2 January 1962 – 27 July 2021) was a British author. Earlier in her life she worked as an actress and model under the name Candy Davis. She went on to wr ...

. It was short-listed for the

Crime Writers' Association The Crime Writers' Association (CWA) is a specialist authors’ organisation in the United Kingdom, most notable for its Dagger awards for the best crime writing of the year, and the Diamond Dagger awarded to an author for lifetime achievement. T ...

Gold Dagger The Gold Dagger is an award given annually by the Crime Writers' Association of the United Kingdom since 1960 for the best crime novel of the year. From 1955 to 1959, the organization named their top honor as the Crossed Red Herring Award. From ...

award, as well as several others. (For the US market, the title was changed to "''The Devil of Nanking''," which had been Hayder's working-title for the book.) ''Tokyo'' was reviewed by the internationally read UK newspaper, the Guardian as well as by Kirkus Reviews under its US title.Hayder, Mo. (2005-04-01
THE DEVIL OF NANKING by Mo Hayder , Kirkus
Kirkusreviews.com. Retrieved on 2014-06-04.

Plot introduction

The story is about a young woman (nicknamed 'Grey' by a fellow mental hospital patient) who is obsessed with the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, also known as the

Rape of Nanking The Nanjing Massacre (, ja, 南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as ''Nanking'') was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Ba ...

. She travels to Japan in order to find a professor said to have rare footage of the massacre detailing an event that she could not otherwise prove occurred. The professor decides that he will only show her the tape if she was to procure an unknown ingredient of Chinese medicine from the local Yakuza group. After being recruited into a host club, Grey finds her chance.

Major themes

The book deals with the evils of ignorance, Grey being a home-schooled child whose mother heavily censored everything she came into contact with, the politics of modern-day

Yakuza , also known as , are members of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan. The Japanese police and media, by request of the police, call them , while the ''yakuza'' call themselves . The English equivalent for the term ...

, and the glitzy underground night-life of

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

, as well as the build-up and reality of the massacre of Nanking and the effect it still has today.

References

2004 British novels British thriller novels Novels set in Tokyo Japan in non-Japanese culture Bantam Press books {{2000s-thriller-novel-stub