It's unfortunate but true that the names of notorious criminals usually outlive those of their victims. We remember Jack the Ripper, not the London prostitutes he butchered. Criminals are also barometers of the societies in which they fester, registering changes in manners and mores. We may not wish the Ripper on anyone, but no portrait of late-Victorian London -- or study of the day's social pathologies -- is complete without him.
Japan has its own rogue's gallery, one that has inspired many plays, books and films, but is little known abroad, save perhaps for its newer additions. The Aum Shinrikyo sect is back in the news again, with foreign commentators drawing the inevitable parallels between its 1995 poison-gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system and the recent terrorist assaults, though Aum's evil genius, Shoko Asahara, remains a shadowy figure abroad.
Now Mark Schreiber, a journalist, translator and expert on Japan's underside, has thrown welcome light on Asahara and his felonious predecessors in "The Dark Side: Infamous Japanese Crimes and Criminals," a followup to his 1996 "Shocking Crimes of Postwar Japan." While the first book concentrated on the half century after the war, the new one goes back to the beginning of the Edo Period (1603-1868), when traditional Japanese culture assumed many of its current forms and many early members of the rogue's gallery flourished.