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It was with some confidence that I parted the blue noren obscuring the door of the Tokyo bathhouse, slipped off my shoes and strode up to the 'bath mistress', a formidable woman of middling age, with forearms like a sumo wrestler who was staffing the counter.

It was with some confidence that I parted the blue noren obscuring the door of the Tokyo bathhouse, slipped off my shoes and strode up to the 'bath mistress', a formidable woman of middling age, with forearms like a sumo wrestler who was staffing the counter.

We sit, just a friend and I at the edge of a deserted road, edging closer to the bushes lining the road, desperately trying to stay in the shade.

You'd have thought the gnarled, snaggle-toothed old man in his tiny wood-and-tin shack was several days' trek from the nearest village, such was the aura of isolation about the place.

Loitering outside the austere concrete monolith that were the police headquarters, instinct told me we should be lying low. Instead, we were trying to draw attention to ourselves while hopping around on the...

“You won’t get a room,” Brenda says, shaking her head. She taps her immaculate red nails on the steering wheel and, for the first time since getting in the cab, her smile wanes.