Reporting, not theory, carries this volume. Vollmann travels through Cambodia and the Thai border zone in the years after the Vietnamese withdrawal, and his method is to let people account for their own violence and then set the accounts against each other.

In Phnom Penh he visits Tuol Sleng and the killing field at Choeung Ek, an amputee rehabilitation centre, and the mined road north to Battambang, where a provincial commander briefs him for an hour before he can ask a question and a commune committee meets beside a dugout roofed with logs to soak up shellfire. Across the frontier he tries to buy his way toward the Khmer Rouge and the logging money that sustains them, and hears from a brothel owner and a smuggler's sister why the movement was not, in their telling, so bad.

Japan's yakuza appear on the same terms: extortionists entirely convinced that they protect the weak.