Now Schreiber, clearly egged on by his publisher, wades in to a full-scale investigation of sixteen of Japan's most notorious crimes of recent years. The book is clearly meant to be as unabashedly sensational as an old-fashioned pulp thriller - its cover splashed with blood - but in fact Schreiber does not naturally write in the gory genre. There is, for instance, so little wild speculation about the diabolical inner workings of the criminal mind that we don't get much of a feeling for who the people who did these strange things were really like.

Schreiber has done an enormous amount of work reading press accounts of these sixteen crimes, holding his own interviews with witnesses, and visiting scenes of the crime to take his own photographs. In a recent conversation with this reviewer, during which he was gently chided for pandering to blood lust, Schreiber pointed out that the book could have been a lot more sensational if he had included the case of the Japanese student in Paris who ate his girlfriend and the case of the dismemberer of little girls who had thousands of pedophiliac videos in his room and spent hours every day viewing them.

The first shocking crime considered here involves the work of Aum Shinrikyu, the crazed religious cult which let loose poison gas in the Tokyo subways during rush hour and was at work on an atom bomb when the cops finally blew the whistle. The subsequent crimes covered are inevitably smaller in scale and therefore less shocking, and sometimes less shocking than simply bizarre. The thought occurs: it may be possible to gain insight into the national psyche through the type of crime in fashion and the methods used by the police to run the criminals down.

It is hard to imagine a more "Japanese" crime, for instance, than that perpetrated by the fellow who posed as a functionary of the Ministry of Health and Welfare and lined up the staff of banks he wanted to rob to get them to obediently down teacups of a poison he dispensed, which he told them would protect them from dysentary. After they collapsed, he helped himself to the till. It is also surely very "Japanese" of the police to never let on to reporters how their investigations are progressing and to go to extraordinary lengths to wrinkle out the faintest of clues. For example, when a four-year-old boy was kidnapped, 60,000 mailmen were alerted to keep an eye out for the boy and altogether 700,000 people eventually got involved looking for the perpetrator. In another case, police checked the back of postage stamps on an envelope to determine the stamp-licker's blood type and later, in the same case, doggedly searched through a year of the Sankei Shimbun to track down what issue a single kanji on a piece of newsprint found under a botched paint job on a questionable vehicle came from so distributors of the paper could be questioned about their subscribers.

The lesson to be learned here is: don't mess with with the Japanese fuzz. Schreiber notes that of the 172 kidnappings in Japan occurring between 1945 and 1993, the arrest rate was 96.l percent. The Japanese police, says Schreiber, hold confessions to be the "King of Evidence" and have a special term - settoku - to indicate the intense verbal persuasion which extracts confessions.

I have seen a Japanese policeman, who all have a daily training session in judo or kendo, take out after a limousine on foot, catch it and stop it.

Schreiber is now reputedly working on a book about shocking crimes in ancient Japan.

Reviewed by Sandor Belfry

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