Moments In Crime

Ciao for now

Alas, my moment in the blog-light is over. I was asked to post an author photo before signing off; show-off that I am, I've decided to provide a few.

This is me when I'm not writing novels.

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This is me the day I received my advance from St Martin's Press.

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This is me after a fishing trip in the North Sea.

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This is me butterfly hunting.

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I could go on and on. (You'll have guessed by now that I don't like photos. I'm a writer, not an actor. That MeettheAuthor video was like pulling teeth!) Thanks to Peter Joseph and Monica Katz at Thomas Dunne Books for inviting me aboard. If you enjoy Escape from Amsterdam, keep your eyes peeled for the next Barrie Sherwood thriller.

Escape from Amsterdam, A Taster, Part II

Chapter 6, Mr Uno (Part 2)

I didn’t want to make the call, but I couldn’t be responsible for Kuwahara getting killed if they came back. I decided to buy some time for myself. Gingerly, Kuwahara swept his hair back from his forehead and I dialled the number on my mobile phone. I stood at the window as it started ringing. On the floodlit soccer pitch outside, the Kyoto University team was having a late night practice in day-glow yellow jerseys. The lamps along the walkway were spinning galaxies of shining insects. In the parking lot, a man stepped out of a car. He put his hand up to the side of his head. The ringing in my right ear stopped. The man stepped out of the shadows and looked up, directly at my window.

“Hello my friend,” came his voice.

I snapped the phone shut. “He’s here!”

Kuwahara’s puffy eyes actually opened for a moment. He hobbled away towards his door. “Don’t take the elevator,” he said.

“Yeah. Thanks. Really, Kuwahara”– slinging the rucksack over my shoulder and making for the door -- “Been great knowing you.”

The door to his room slammed behind him.

I wanted to run, but I’d never make it to the bottom of the staircase before Uno or his men got there. I needed another option. I’d climb down the outside of the building! I rushed back into my room, pushed the window open, and looked down the outer wall. It was perfectly flush. Not a cornice or a drainpipe in sight. How had I never noticed this before? I ran back into the corridor. I thought of hiding in a toilet stall. Stupid. My blood would look all the redder splashed across the clean white tiles.

No one ever takes the elevator. But there it was, waiting on my floor.

I pushed the button.

The doors obliged. 

There is another option: the hatch in the ceiling! The hero forces open the service hatch in the ceiling, climbs up, and – crouching in the thrumming darkness of the elevator shaft – fits the light-cover back into place just as the villain enters underneath! Thank you, Bruce Willis!

I stepped inside and pressed ⑥.

The silvery plastic grid in the ceiling came out easily: a little gentle pressure and it eased up and away. With my feet on the handrails along the walls, I put my head and shoulders through the gap. Two fluorescent tubes were set into a white steel panel just above my head, but there was no latch between them. I ran my hands along the edges, feeling for a seam, then pushed as hard as I could. The bell chimed as the elevator came to the sixth floor.

The doors opened.

The doors closed.

The elevator moaned as it began to descend. There was no way I could control it now. Perhaps there was a latch behind the lights? With a sharp tug, one of the fluorescent tubes came out in my hand, the metal brace hot enough to burn my palm. But there was nothing behind it. The elevators must be different in Hollywood.

The bell chimed again. The display next to my head read 3.

The doors slid open. Mr Uno was standing in front of the door, hands on his thighs, heaving for breath. He put one hand against the open doors and called down the corridor. “He’s here. Go tell the rest of them to come up.” He looked up at me and shook his head. “What are you doing, Fujiwara?”

Standing on the handrails with the fluorescent bulb in my hand, I was somewhat at pains to explain my actions with any convincing excuse. I started but he cut me off: “Oh, just come down.”

My face has never once been struck by a weapon or fist; it is still as handsome as it was in those cherubic school photographs from the Fourth Grade. I have never suffered a broken bone, nor any lesion grievous enough to leave a scar. How then did I extract my pristine self from this situation? Did I mention that I still had the fluorescent bulb in my right hand? I am not a violent man. I made a little hop and dropped to the floor of the elevator. At the same time, I lashed the bulb down across Mr Uno’s forehead. It made a dull pop. White dust and shards of glass showered down around him. He grunted and lurched toward me. Again, I should emphasize that my actions were very much out of character. I brought the jagged stub of bulb up into Mr Uno’s face as he came at me. He reared backwards with a roar, hands on his forehead.

“Ohhh! Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh my eyes. Oh my eyes. Oh my eyes.”

I found the acoustics of his pain strangely plaintive and moving, but only momentarily. I punched G and Close Door on the panel and read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in its entirety waiting for the doors to shut. My last view of Mr Uno was of him stumbling, bloodied, towards the far wall, picking at the milky-white shards in his eyes.

 When the elevator came to G, I heard the cheerful bing! like a sprinter hears the starter’s pistol. 

 

 I spent the night on a leather couch at the back of a Starbucks. They don’t like it when you stretch out to sleep on their furniture so the waitress came around periodically to remind me to buy something. Whenever she woke me up I ordered another espresso that I didn’t drink and then went back to sleep. In the morning, when the place was filling up and I couldn’t keep the couch to myself anymore, I counted seven espressos on the table, an expenditure of just under 2000 yen, which is as cheap a night as you’ll find in central Kyoto. Thinking that Mr Uno might be expecting me to leave town at the earliest opportunity, I hung around the department stores in Kawaramachi until the early afternoon, then made my way cautiously to the station to catch the Speed of Lightness express south. 

 

 

Escape from Amsterdam, A Taster

Chapter 6 Mr Uno (Part 1), in which our intrepid hero, Aozora ("blue skies" in Japanese), on the run from Mr Uno, goes home to get a change of clothes...

    On my way to the station to buy a ticket for Marumachi, I stopped in at the university for what I hoped would be a short visit, to pick up clean clothes, a couple of books, and some different CDs. I took my usual clandestine route across the park from Ito-dori, under the camellia bushes, and through the kitchen window with the broken latch.

I didn’t remember leaving my room in quite such a mess: all the desk drawers were stacked on the floor, and the contents of my closet had avalanched. But my friend next door, Kuwahara, had a double of my key. Knowing him, he’d probably come through like a tornado on a mad search for condoms in the middle of the night. I emptied my pockets on the desk and paused a moment to gaze at the photos on the corkboard. All of them of Kasane. Kasane in kimono on eighteenth birthday. Kasane wrapped in blanket next to campfire. Kasane biting gold volleyball medal. Kasane and a once happy Aozora at the top of Sky Building. And the last one, sent from Hokkaido with a letter saying how wonderful her new job was, Kasane in her white snowboard instructor outfit, grinning behind a pair of orange iridium glasses. I think I must have sighed. I shook myself out of it and put some Nirvana on the stereo.

With the music blaring, I couldn’t hear the door opening. I was crouched down, digging for some clean underwear in the pile of clothes on the floor, and didn’t notice there was someone else in the room until the guitars and drums and Kurt Cobain’s rasping voice all of a sudden stopped.

    In that moment I had a vision in my mind’s eye of Mr Uno as I had seen him last. He was wearing one of his Hawaiian shirts, birds of paradise on a cerise sunset. His hair was greased back to emphasize his flat-nosed, jut-jawed face, and the eczema-like affliction on his neck – a raw, desiccated patch of pink skin that stretched from his open collar to his ears – was glistening with sweat. The only difference was, in this vision he wasn’t making cocktails; he was standing in my room, levelling a handgun at the back of my head. (Here’s a page from a recent edition of Diamond Back that does some justice to the guy’s grim mug.) I took the desk chair by the legs, heaved it into the air and whirled around, ready to knock him senseless. Kuwahara backed into the corridor with his hands up in front of his face. “Easy! It’s me!” he croaked, and fell into a spate of unctuous coughing, doubled over to his knees.
    “Damn it, Kuwahara, can’t you knock?” I tried breathing again, dropped the chair, and went back to the pile of clothes on the floor. “So what colour were her panties?” I asked. “You didn’t have to tear the place apart, you know. The condoms are right there on the shelf.”

   He stopped coughing but didn’t respond. His breathing was coming loud and laboured, unnaturally wheezy. Something obviously wasn’t right. I turned around to face him again. He straightened up and I saw his lop-sided, lemon-yellow, green, and scarlet face.

“What the hell…” I muttered under my breath. “Kuwahara?”

It could have been a car accident. He could have fallen off his motorbike. He could have fallen off a cliff. But the way he was staring at me meant something else...

“Someone came looking for you,” he said through bloated lips.

My stomach twisted into a Mobius Strip. I wanted to retch but it came out as a strange, prolonged groan. I swivelled the chair around and tried to get him to sit but he backed away, waving one dismissive hand in front of him.

“He said he was your friend,” he continued grimly, half-heartedly raising a finger, “but I know you, Fujiwara. You don’t have any friends.”

“Slick hair?” I mumbled. “Hawaiian shirt?”

He tried to nod, but his neck was stiff and his whole torso just sort of shifted to one side.

Poor Kuwahara, he didn’t deserve this. He was a good-looking, happy guy at a wonderful stage in which his adolescent shyness was alternating with newfound over-confidence. He came from a nice family in Shimane. I met his mom and dad in first year. His dad – ill-shaven piano teacher in a turquoise Lacoste – took us out for steak and talked about all the girls he’d met in university and how much fun we were going to have. His mom was kind of appealing in an “I-could-teach-you-the-ropes” kind of way, smiling at her own never-to-be-revealed stories while her husband played the buffoon.

   In my most solemn voice I asked Kuwahara what had happened.

Kuwahara leaned against the far wall of the corridor with arms crossed limply in front of him. I couldn’t be sure if he was looking at me when he spoke. I couldn’t be sure that he could even see. “On my way for a bath,” he said. “The guy in the Hawaiian shirt was in the corridor. He asked where you were. I said I didn’t know but he didn’t believe me. He says: ‘Come on now, you’re a good neighbour. You know where he is.' So I just kept walking. I didn’t want any trouble. But then he pushed me from behind and I ran into the stairwell. I got down two flights of stairs when I heard a door crash open below. I should have known he wasn’t alone. I ran down the second floor corridor to the elevator.”

I shook my head. Fool, I thought. Didn’t he ever watch any action films? You never take the elevator. You’re a sitting duck. The only way the hero makes it out of an elevator alive is to spread-eagle himself ninja-style across the ceiling with the unsuspecting villain standing right beneath and then drop on top of him like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately, Kuwahara’s musculature made this tactic rather implausible.

“They caught me before the doors closed,” he said.

I wanted to tell him how sorry I was but it would have been meaningless. He wouldn’t have let me anyway. I grabbed my army surplus rucksuck and shoved in a book and some clothes.

“How much do you owe him?” he asked me.

   “Price of a house.”

“Really?” he said. “A nice one?”

He was so genuine, Kuwahara. So good. Every word the guy said was making me want to cry. “Sure, Kuwahara,” I replied, “a nice one. A one-bedroom pre-fab in the burbs. Look, I’m going to disappear for a while. Perhaps you should make yourself scarce too.”

“But the guy with the shirt wants you to call him,” he said. He pointed in the general direction of his head. I now realized that what I had thought was bruising or smudged grease or something else across his forehead was, in fact, Magic Marker. A telephone number.

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Don't touch that dial. Chapter 6, Part 2 tomorrow.

Manga-ificent!

To lighten up the mood after yesterday's lecture, I thought I'd let the images do even more of the talking today. As I said before, when I was writing EFA I was using images as a kind of scaffold for the narrative. But there were times when I felt I needed something else... manga.

Why? Why put manga in a novel? Well, why not? (I wanted holograms, free chewing gum, and sound chips in the novel too but my UK publisher wouldn't go for it.) So I asked my good friend Richard Perkins if he knew much about this particular literary genre/art form. Richard's a very gifted oil painter and an old friend from British Columbia. He now lives and paints in Boston, Mass. But don't take my word for his talent. This is some of his most recent work below...

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If you're intrigued, you can see more at www.richardperkinsarts.com. (And if you're in the Boston area, drop by his studio. Tell him I sent you. Take him some Chinese coconut buns and Canadian lager and that'll put you on his best side.)

With his usual enthusiasm and a good deal of brio, working in an art form he knew relatively little about, Richard cooked up the work you see below in amazingly short time.

This is Chrono, a very macho wristwatch who lives in a post-armageddon underground world of subway trains and animate groceries.

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This is an episode from a fictitious manga called Diamond Back. If you look very closely, you'll see that the snake is robotic, his skin formed of riveted panels.

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This is when the hero, Aozora, and a dead-ringer for his old girlfriend hook up. Almost. Shinji shows up and ruins things. As he tends to do...

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If you like these manga-inspired drawings, there's more in store. Rich is now at work on a graphic novel and, from what I've seen, it'll be a stunner.

A demain! Until tomorrow!

Tetrapods

These are concrete tetrapods I photographed near Uchinaura, Kyushu. They're the newest model T-38s to be precise. They stand some twelve feet tall and can weigh up to fifty tons. About the only things that will last longer than the rows of these stretched along the Japanese coastline are the pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, and the Hoover dam. (You may agree with me that these last three monuments to human ingenuity have somewhat more aesthetic value...)

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"But who cares?" I hear you say. "Isn’t this supposed to be a blog about a thriller? I want to read about concrete boots at the bottom of the Hudson, not concrete erosion defences."

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Concrete boots may be a staple cliche of the New York mafia, but if you want to learn something about how organized crime operates in Japan, take a look at concrete tetrapods instead.

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Between 1995 and 2005, Japan spent some 6.2 trillion dollars on public works such as dams, bridges, highways, and sea defences like these tetrapods. That's four times what the US spent in the same period. Take a look at the nearest map. Consider the relative sizes of the two countries and you'll guess what the once beautiful Japanese landscape must look like now. All Japan's rivers have been dammed and encased in concrete embankments. Over 60% of the coastline has been lined with concrete. The countryside is networked with empty roads and useless overpasses. The initiatives that the Ministry of Finance began in the 50's -- channelling money into construction to subsidize failing rural economies -- haven't changed. The first casualty of Japan's "headless system of governance" is logic, the second is the landscape of the nation itself.

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What's the yakuza got to do with it? Everything. There's no place on earth -- not Brooklyn, not Moscow, not Palermo -- where the mafia is so deeply embedded in business and government. On average 1.3% of every transaction in the nation goes to the mafia. A bowl of ramen, a used Toyota, a Gucci handbag, a taxi ride across town, a multi-million dollar hydroelectric dam -- doesn't matter what. And tetrapods are particularly profitable. Of the US$5 billion that the Ministries of Construction, Transport and Agriculture spend annually on sprinkling tetrapods up and down the coast, 10% goes to mafia kickbacks. Extortion, drugs, prostitution -- the profits pale in comparison to the benefits of just laying some concrete.

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My character Mr Gondo is a gangster who profits from these kickbacks. But he's also a scrupulous town-councillor who realizes the benefit of construction money to the rural economy. He's just the kind of complex character you might meet in the real Japan. Escape from Amsterdam only brushes the super-slick surface of this corruption. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend Alex Kerr's, Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan and -- though it may be a bit dated now -- Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power. And if you were considering a trip to Japan... sooner the better. Much of it might look like a scene from Bladerunner, but some of it still looks like it did in Kurosawa films.

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There. Lecture over. Tomorrow, manga!

Sherpas, Liberace and the Final Fantasy

I’ve written this blog in much the same way I wrote the book, by using photographs as a kind of scaffold for the narrative. Images are one of the things I use to keep me fully engaged in the writing process. Some of them I include in the fiction itself. Here’s a brief introduction to the characters in Escape from Amsterdam using the photos that served me as models, guides, trusty sherpas, beacons, and pillars of fire (if that’s not too grandiose).

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Aozora Fujiwara is the hero (or anti-hero) of the novel. This is how I see him. (Just click on the image for a larger view.)

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This is how he sees himself...

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These are the likenesses I used for my characterization of Mr Gondo, a yakuza crime boss. He is as clever and cruel as the first, dresses like the second, and spends like the third. Notice the similarity in hairstyles.

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Incidentally – actually, coincidentally, I decided upon Mr Gondo’s name not one hour before being stuck behind this dump truck in Fukuoka traffic. It reads "Gondo" on the back. Perfect. I always keep a camera with me to record these little coincidences – my own personal evidence of life’s mysterious weave. 

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This is Mai, Aozora’s disappeared sister. I’ve never played Final Fantasy, but something about this video game image mirrors Mai’s composure and strength (though she doesn’t stand on water). This image is still on the wall beside my writing desk.

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These are Aozora’s dad’s topiary bushes. I wondered what kind of person might devote himself to creating dinosaur and elephant topiary. The result was Mr Fujiwara.

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This is Shinji, a surfer and small-time thug who works for Mr Gondo. Sometimes he feels like this…

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but most often he feels like this…

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This is a lawyer whose ears resemble the pectoral fins of the Hawaiian pig-nosed reef trigger (Humuhumunukunukuapua’a in Hawaiian. Memorize it. Amaze your friends at parties.)

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This is Mrs Kakinoki. Her role is short, but she's my favorite character in the book. I met her near Kojima in southern Japan. Those are cherry tomatoes she's carrying, to feed the wild macaques on an island just offshore.

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These are weekend monks who show Aozora a popular spot for committing suicide. Whether he does or not, I won't say...

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Tomorrow, more than you ever wanted to know about tetrapods...

Welcome to Amsterdam

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After enjoying yourself in breathless suspense in the Mysterious Escher Ride, why not come to Harry Potterdam and visit tulips and windmills and museums to your heart's content? Van Gogh-ville is where you can find many splendid shops that are not easy to choose from! Visitors will find in Vermeerendam a peaceful rural scene with a beautiful view of windmills turning slowly! When you are tired of walking and feel hungry, stroll over to Utrecht and enjoy cuisine from the world!

Enough of the tourist brochure lingo. It may look like Amsterdam in the photographs, but it's actually Huis ten Bosch, a Dutch theme-city in the south of Japan. Much of the island of Kyushu looks like this...

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A tropical "paradise" with secluded white-sand beaches, monkey-inhabited islands offshore, fishing villages out of a fairy tale. If no one told you it weren't Fiji or the Philippines, you wouldn't guess it. But now a Monaco-sized chunk of it looks like this...

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If no one told you it weren't Holland...

The logic is, why go all the way to Holland when you can just construct one at home? I lived for four years in Japan and visited Huis ten Bosch on numerous occasions, wandering around in disbelief. And little by little it dawned on me that this was the perfect setting for a novel, a setting that looked convincing enough on the surface, but one with a rotten underbelly of corruption and vice. Kind of like Japan itself...

If you're interested in hearing more, why not go to http://us.macmillan.com/escapefromamsterdam ? Click on the Meet the Author link and you'll see me, Barrie Sherwood, in my favorite orange shirt talking about Escape from Amsterdam.

Until tomorrow, mata ashta.

Blogging This Week: Barrie Sherwood

Barrie Sherwood was born in 1971 in Hong Kong, the son of missionaries. He began Escape from Amsterdam while living in Fukuoka, Japan. He currently lives in England, where he teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

    Aozora---idle university student, future crooked bureaucrat, fresh broken heart---has been playing too much mah-jongg and now finds himself deep in debt. When Auntie Okane dies and leaves him and his sister Mai a priceless inheritance, he thinks his problems are solved. But they’re only just beginning.
    Mai’s disappeared, taken hostage by a notorious yakuza gang. Aozora can’t collect the cash without her and his loan sharks are becoming impatient. So begins a fast-paced adventure that takes him to the deep south of Japan and the surreal environs of a Dutch theme park called Amsterdam. It sounds like a holiday, but Aozora is about to enter the real world. . . .
    Featuring the Japanese mob, motorcycle gangs, a phony princess, topiary dinosaurs, high-tech love dolls, and a selection of Japanese manga, Escape from Amsterdam is playful, offbeat, and thrilling. It paints a surprising portrait of contemporary Japan that few Westerners have seen and introduces a strikingly original and inventive writer.