Modern Tokyo is an unusual but fitting setting for a thriller, and long-term resident Hugh Ashton is sufficiently familiar with its physical and cultural nooks and crannies to create an authentic fictional version of the city. Ashton’s use of an IT geek everyman, Kenneth Sharpe, as his protagonist is a successful choice, and At the Sharpe End nicely captures both life for a westerner in the Japanese capital and the sense of an ordinary person caught in events beyond his control. 

The plot revolves around a Japanese IT genius who has made an invention desired by several national governments and the Japan-based Korean underworld. Sharpe is unwittingly drawn into this mess and retains an endearingly anti-establishment, phlegmatic approach as he moves step by step towards life-threatening danger. The other principal characters - Sharpe’s wife and the Indian couple who are their best friends - also work well, being clearly delineated and rounded figures. This reader at least still has the hots for Vishal’s wife Meema and would have found it difficult to be as restrained as Kenneth Sharpe. The secondary characters are perhaps less successful, with none of the gangsters, policeman or diplomats that feature quite finding their own voice, but they serve their purpose in keeping the plot moving.

As a former employee of the British Embassy in Tokyo I took particular pleasure in seeing its fictional diplomats embroiled in an international criminal conspiracy. My own spell at the Embassy pales into tedium in comparison.

Does spelling matter? That's the titular question posed by a new book from Oxford academic Simon Horobin, reviewed in The Guardian today. Most of us would surely say "yes":  a free-for-all might have some appeal to those who struggle with their orthography, but reading would become pretty tough if the spelling of words differed wildly from one document to the next. Ever tried reading Chaucer in the original? And the distinctions between "discreet" and "discrete", "where" and "wear" and many other homonyms would be lost if there were no established orthodoxy.
Of course there is some difference between even correct spelling across the varieties of English. American spelling tends to be simpler than the British, but then it has to be (I kid my dear cousins, I kid). Frankly, living as I do in Japan, a non-English speaking country where American English is the most common form of the language, I find myself looking at my extra Us and the additional "-me" on the end of "programme" and thinking it would be a great deal easier if all forms of English agreed to use Daniel Webster's version. But then I catch myself, like Luke realising he has one black glove.
Horobin makes the good point that English spelling, while infuriating at times, has value because it captures the history of the language. Too true - we Brits at least have all those superfluous Us to remind us of our Norman overlords, and can draw on sturdy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary when referring to our current rulers.
In my view, a common orthography, shared at least among users of each version of English, is needed for the same reason that a shared grammar and even a shared literary canon are needed: they provide common ground for us to communicate.
As for the apocryphal end to a job application letter, "I look forward to herring from you shorty", why assume it was a spelling mistake? Just reply "We're out of herring fatty; will you accept haddock?"