Stephen Phelan

TOKYO is plagued by crows. They are thieves and murderers, stealing the eggs of meeker birds and biting through high-speed internet cables. Walking through Ueno Park to meet David Peace this morning, I watch one of them drag a plastic bag of food away from a sleeping homeless man. There is another screaming on a bare branch outside Peace’s office in Nezu, and it continues for the duration of our interview. “I actually quite like them,” says Peace.

WAKE UP. Spike Lee keeps repeating this. Watch any of his movies, or ‘joints’, as he calls them, and at some point you’ll start to feel that you’re missing the point, or that there isn’t one, or that there are too many to grip. He admits that he doesn’t make films that are about “just one thing” – he’ll throw five or six basketballs on the court, and you’re free to play with as many of them as you can. But essentially, he is telling you to wake up.

PRIVATE Bill Stone requested combat duty. Serving with the United States Army in Vietnam between April 1967 and November 1968, he killed enemy soldiers with grenades and was badly wounded twice. He also formulated certain doubts about America, which he repeats today: “How can you send only the poor to fight? If you’re going to war, go with everybody.” Stone himself was never poor, and had enlisted under his middle name because he thought “Oliver” sounded too soft and monied. Later, he became a world-famous, Oscar-winning film director with a Vietnam war movie called Platoon (1986), which drew on his most lucid memories of physical pain and animal fear, but also of some other, less material dimension he detected in the jungle. Oliver Stone leans forward to show me the white scar in the back of his head.

CATCH a bullet train out of Tokyo at night, and watch the megacity warp into a single continuous strip of bright and indecipherable signage. The carriage seems to float above the rails and a polite hush reigns within, as the view blurs into Yokohama, then Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka; the world outside the window a boundless field of energy. The circuit finally breaks at some point north of Kyoto, where the countryside suddenly begins, and all that electric light gives way to occasional fires in the distance. Inside one of those fires is an evil wooden fish, burned in effigy every year by rowdy Japanese villagers.

LAST Sunday in the French Alps, more than 5000 people gathered to watch a succession of professionals and capable amateurs attempt to ski down a mountain and across a lake, from one shore to the other. None of them made it, or even came close. Some were at least able to remain upright, even elegant, cutting a smooth, continuous line through the vertical of the slope and then horizontally across the water, before slowing to a stop and sinking well short of dry land. They looked like captains going down with their ships, and the crowd saluted them as such.

WHAT other novelists refer to as research, Richard Price calls “hanging out”. Most often, this means spending time with police officers in and around New York, whose experience tends to have a direct bearing on the stories that Price chooses to tell. For the sake of specificity, he may also need to sit in on staff meetings with local restaurant managers and community outreach workers – as he did for his latest novel, Lush Life – or to participate in drug deals on dark corners of certain housing projects, if only as an observer.

LEAVING law and morality aside, the best argument against bringing back hanging is that the hangmen themselves are all dead. A final Home Office list of official executioners was printed up in February 1964, and made obsolete when capital punishment was suspended the following year. Those six whose names appeared on it have long since gone to their own graves. There is nobody left in this country with the relevant training or experience to operate a gallows, which was in the end a more complex piece of equipment than it looked.

ONE morning last January, the fishermen of Taiji were surprised to find a large, living whale in their communal net. It seemed to have swum out of the past. For thousands of years, many and varied marine mammals have steered close to the Kumano coast on their long undersea circuits between breeding and feeding grounds. Where Japanese whaling began with a passive acceptance of beached creatures as gifts from the gods, it first became an active, organised hunt here in Taiji circa 1606, which was then known as “kujira to tomo ni ikiru machi”, or “the town that lives with the whales”. The town is now dying, along with its only industry.

TO arrive in Iga-Ueno on the first Saturday in April is to feel like a stranger in ninjatown. This small city in the mountains, about two hours by rail from Kyoto, is supposedly the ancestral home of those fearsome feudal super-sneaks and master-killers, whose name and reputation have long since spread across the world through martial arts movies, comic books, and video games. Here in Japan, ninjas are now something of a national myth, a slightly cartoonish composite of old folk tales and modern pop culture. This morning in Iga-Ueno, however, it would be discourteous to dispute their existence.

THE first time that Sudhir Venkatesh witnessed a drive-by shooting, he remained upright while everyone around him dropped to the pavement. “I just stood there,” he says. “Like a tree.” Venkatesh is a tall man – a big target. He would have been even harder to miss back then, almost 20 years ago, when he was a hippyish middle-class sociology student with a long ponytail and a tie-dyed t-shirt, conducting field research in Chicago’s biggest, poorest housing project, the Robert Taylor Homes.