Then there was the Hiroshima-ness of Hiroshima. Riddley Walker's landscapes were made more real by being a non-native speaker in crowded trains, by whole days going by without conversing with anyone. Looking back, I think it could do this so well because of who, what and where I was. The book got inside me and, for two or three days, it took over. Riddley Walker was more than just a fellow-traveller, however. Apart from weekends with my girlfriend and emails from friends, most of my companionship during those four years came from what was on my bookshelves.

It may be true that the lonelier the stretch of life, the more intensely experienced the novels read in that stretch. Fifth, a serious deterioration in the quality of my spelling and grammar. Fourth, wonderment at the novel's ambition and ideas. Third, a jigsaw-puzzle addiction as the bigger pic ture begins to emerge. Second, a realisation that effort expended on understanding this language is being rewarded at an incredible rate of interest. First, bafflement at this hotpot of language where Chaucer, numbers, the bastardised contemporary, future neologisms and orphaned archaisms all stew, bubble and rattle the lid. My reactions to Riddley Walker, I guess, evolved in a similar way to those of most readers. (Mr Punch's resemblance to Tengu, a lecherous Japanese folk-figure whose giant nose corresponds to another protruding organ due south, must have caused some amusement for the library staff.) Here it was, an American edition with Mr Punch on the cover.

Since my student days in Canterbury in the late 1980s, Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker had been 'revealed' to me a number of times, and one morning at the beginning of January the librarian telephoned to say a new consignment of books had arrived for me. By the time my third year came around, I'd begun work on those books which the universe lets you know it wants you to read by dint of serendipitous references and glimpses. By the end of the second year I'd worked through the books I'd allowed others to assume I had read even though I hadn't. By the end of my first year I'd read the books I'd always intended to read. This was paradise for someone wanting to teach himself how to write novels, and not only because of the uninterrupted solitude. It took a very lost or determined person to come knocking at my door. As the sole foreign employee in the institution's 50-year history, I was put in a dingy office under a sunless building much like Fox Mulder's den, but less snug. The end-of-the-world atmosphere was caused not so much by its mountainous location, however, but by its dearth of students.Young people are in short supply in rapidly ageing Japan and I was not alone in having salaried, unsupervised time to burn. F or four years straddling the turn of the millennium I worked at a technical university in the middle of nowhere, east of Hiroshima.

Riddley walker book