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HUMAN TORSO FOUND ON SHINJUKU STREET. Headlines don't get much more sensational than this one, which appeared here in Tokyo a few weeks back. A particularly grisly image was summoned, far beyond even Moriyama Daido's brilliant grim snaps of battered cats, gutter urination, and squalid back alleys. It was basically accurate, albeit a rare quiet street and the thing found inside a plastic bag. The authorities' best guess at identification - 30ish Asian male - and the location close to the notorious Kabukicho area, led me and undoubtedly many others to think of gangs. Someone got in debt too deep, or offended the wrong guy. Happens all the time. Sometimes even in Japan.

Then some time later a pair of legs turned up in a disused Shibuya garden, a few stops away on the Yamanote Line. Then a head out in suburban Machida.

Today's paper gave the ghastly riddle's surprising solution. A young woman was arrested for murdering her well-to-do (major brokerage firm) young husband - with a wine bottle, as he slept - then cutting up the body and choosing, for some reason, to distribute the pieces in sundry Tokyo locales she reached simply by taxi. It seems the couple began to get on terribly after just a few months of marriage, both were having affairs, and she claimed he abused her. She had come to hate him passionately. She said she cut up the body because it was "heavier than expected" and she wanted to get it "out of my sight as soon as possible."

From the various anatomical parts around Tokyo, police literally pieced together the crime.

I often think of Tokyo as a place that contains the infinite. Everything imaginable and plenty that's not. Some thirteen million people with as many stories and more. The powerful and the abject, the content and the unfulfilled and the desperate.

The possibility of surprise never diminishes. And there is always something new to be found if one looks deeper, though we may sometimes be better off not looking. The scale makes the whole of this city unfathomable. But can we at least attempt to know something by examining (without being merely voyeuristic or seeking only the lurid) a few of the countless fragments all around Tokyo? This blog will present such random findings, unlabeled, heedless of common aesthetic standards and with no effort to reveal beauty. But no apologies if it occurs by accident.

After all, in Tokyo anything can happen.