Environmental Anxiety: an ecocritical reading of David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy

Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan evolved from a feudal to a modern state where cities renovated their structures and modified their landscapes. The capital saw significant changes both in its political and administrative infrastructure, and in the architecture and social composition. David Peace starts his noir narrative in a bombed Tōkyō, leading the reader through its reconstruction. The description provided by the author highlights a defeated capital deprived of modernity, prestige, and power. The city and the nature blur their boundaries while humans are degraded and compared to animals. This thesis proposes an ecocritical reading of the Tōkyō trilogy by David Peace. The introduction explores Japanese culture and its relationship with nature, highlighting both traditional concepts of harmony and elements of ecophobia in historical and modern cities. The first chapter examines the postwar Tōkyō and its environmental disturbance elements. Human actions act as agents interconnected with natural elements that cause destruction. The second chapter focuses on describing the city as a cultural and natural hybrid, describing also the rebirth of the city from its ashes. The emphasis is set on the Olympic Games and the symbol of the chrysanthemums. A further section is dedicated to the concept of the “cities within the city”. The final chapter analyses the inversion between human and non-human, representing humans as animals as part of the process of a metamorphosis.