Paul Murphy is an award-winning journalist who has worked for a variety of print and broadcast media for over two decades in Japan and Ireland. He is currently a television reporter for RTE's Investigations Unit in Dublin and has previously worked as a writer and copy editor for the Mainichi Daily News, as a business reporter with the International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo and freelanced for a variety of publications including the Irish Times and Irish Independent dailies. His first book, True Crime Japan, is based on over a year spent in the courtrooms of Matsumoto City in Nagano Prefecture where he followed cases ranging from an octogenarian convicted for stealing food from a supermarket; to a middle-aged man who beat his 91-year-old mother to death; to a former yakuza (gangster) jailed for pimping teenage girls. The book relies not just on information yielded from typically lengthy (and usually revealing) courtroom cross examinations but also interviews with neighbours and families of defendants as well as lawyers and police and others connected. All are interwoven with insight from Murphy's own experience of a decade living and working in Japan. The result is a book of stories about people that is as much about Japanese society as about Japanese crime. So why is all of this of interest? Firstly, Japan is a fascinating country and this book reveals much about its people, using the courtroom as a lens to view the society. Secondly, its justice system is equally fascinating as it blends a prosecutorial style which can be surprisingly forgiving — especially for non-drug crimes — with an unyieldingly harsh prison system. Thirdly, we should pay attention to Japan because, objectively, the justice system works much better there than in most, arguably all, other rich countries. Crime is very low even by the standards of East Asia and imprisonment rates are far beneath other major economies and a fraction of the US, which in 2012 jailed, proportionate to population, 13 times more of its people than Japan. Japan can not only enthral us, but it can also teach us.