Long before he carries out his awful murders, "Kazuki Daido" (the criminal's real name has not been published) is shown to be a victim, of bullying at school, but also of his parents, who in their well-meaning way are as inadequate as he is. A gang of boys arrested last year called the muggings they carried out on middle aged salarymen oyaji-gari - "uncle-hunting".In 1986 there were 2,800 cases of violence in schools Ten years later, the figure was 10,500. On Friday the Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, inaugurated an advisory panel to address the problem. "If we leave these problems unattended," he said, "they will certainly lead to trouble for our country."The Japanese are proud that their crime rate remains one of the lowest in the industrialised world. But the sense of security has been undermined by almost weekly reports of juvenile outrages. In January, a 13-year-old boy stabbed his teacher to death after she told him off for arriving late.

A few days later, a schoolboy knifed a policeman because, he explained, he wanted the officer's revolver. In February a 15-year-old boy shot his teacher in the face with an airgun after being sent out of his class, and a few days later two 13-year-old girls kicked to death an old man who owed them 2,000 yen (pounds 9). The reader is brought inside his mind when BJ speaks to him: "You're different from those stupid sheep, so eat the meat and drink the blood."The publication of Ms Hayami's book coincides with a near-frenzy about the growing number of shocking crimes committed by Japanese children. The horror of the crime was exceeded only by the shock when its perpetrator was discovered to be a 14-year-old local boy who used to play with his victim.After interviewing his friends and members of his family, Ms Hayami wrote her book in the form of the killer's diary. Apart from the frankness of its physical descriptions, the most startling thing about it is the sympathy with which the central character is treated. He attacks two girls with a hammer, killing one and maiming the other. The book ends with his arrest after the final and most appalling act, a crime that would be far-fetched even in a manga comic book (known for their violent and sexually explicit content).

But Yukiko Hayami, a quietly spoken journalist with one of Japan's most respected current affairs magazines, is no pulp crime writer, and the most horrifying thing about the acts described in her book is that they all really happened.A fictionalised account, 14 tells the story of one of the most awful crimes in recent Japanese history, last year's murder of a 10-year-old boy named Jun Eto in the city of Kobe.After going missing for a few days, Eto's body was found dumped in a patch of undergrowth; his head was found half a mile away, neatly washed and placed at the gate of his school with a taunting note stuffed into its mouth. Daido starts by jabbing a knife into the dead body of his grandmother as it is laid out for burial; he graduates to cats whose severed tongues he keeps in a jar in his pocket. THE violence in Yukiki Hayami's latest book, 14, begins when Kazuki Daido, its teenage narrator, follows instructions from BJ, a homicidal personality that lives inside his head. "Frankly, we have no idea how to achieve that."This seems more realistic than the analysis of American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who warned in Rome yesterday that the US was "not going to stand by and watch" the Serbian authorities create bloodshed in Kosovo She "did not rule out" any options to end the violence.. For now, Serbian operations have been restricted to the rural Drenica area, west of the capital, Pristina. Most Kosovo Albanians are against armed struggle, partly because they know that the balance of forces is tipped heavily in the Serbs' favour.That does not preclude the possibility of a protracted dirty war in which the Albanians launch modest guerrilla raids on Serb targets in the hope of winning international sympathy when the brutal counter-attack comes. The Serbs, in return, might welcome a pretext for their "anti- terrorist" raids.A six-nation foreign ministers' meeting on Kosovo in London tomorrow, hopes to get the two sides talking about an autonomy package for the Albanians But that, too, seems distant.