We hike through the hallucinogenic landscape as the neighborhood

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Gets nicer and we finally come out into a great park surrounded by flashing skyscrapers that makes Times Square look puny by comparison. It is Alta Square, named—as far as I can understand from our guide— for a TV and recording studio that overlooks it. That sounds backward to me—surely the studio was named for the area, not the other way around; but then I suppose that if Times Square and Herald Square are named for the newspapers published there, shouldn't that tradition be extended to newer media too?

"I expected a lot," Bono says, staring at the neon explosions, "but I didn't expect this!" Beneath the lights, in the park in the middle of the square, there is what seems to be a big communist rally going on. It's a photo-op for sure, and Anton shoots U2 walking back and forth with the red banners and podium-pounding speakers in the background.

"They have no religion in Tokyo," Bono says, waving an arm at the electric signs. "Only the oldest go to church. So these are their stained glass windows."

A little, round-faced Japanese fellow keeps genuflecting to U2, saying "Bono, Bono! Edge, Edge! Bono, Bono!" Anton's next location is the Shinjuku train station. There is a wave of screaming from teenage girls as U2 plows into the rush-hour mob. It really is chaos. Anton shoots the band walking through the station, waiting on the platforms, and even stepping onto a train. (When the doors close and the train pulls out, Anton is left behind. Needless to say we jump out at the next station, run over to the opposite track, and are very grateful when we land back where we started.) Bono maneuvers his way through the mob on the platform, calling, "Purgatory now boarding on Track 7! Last train for Hades—Track 2!

"What I'll remember is voices," Bono shouts over the nonstop loud­speaker making train announcements. "The voices of the traffic over the voices of the loudspeakers over the voices of the carols! All of these voices on top of each other."

Off the train, commuters converge on Bono, with pens and paper and cameras. One guy yanks off his Walkman and places it on Bono's head. It's playing "Even Better than the Real Thing." Larry stands off to one side laughing at Bono, the international diplomat, bowing and shaking hands, bowing and shaking hands. Anton, well over six feet tall, wades in above the little rock stars and their little fans, snapping away.

As we leave the station Bono says, "Mind you, it's a very advanced

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civilization where people wear face masks when they have colds." That's true, but in an island country so desperately overcrowded it is probably also a tough necessity. Just as the strict adherence to order and structure and rules is. There're just too many people to accommodate the sort of independence and, I guess, self-centeredness that Westerners assume to be a birthright. Lately it seems as if every week another new disease, or a new vaccine-resistant strain of an old one, pops up in another urban area. That's the end of the world I'm worried about: one in which we cram so many humans into the subway that nature decides to thin us out like a fat herd in tick season.

Riding back to the hotel Bono says that the three most amazing cities he's been to are Tokyo, Mexico City, and Cairo. I ask why Cairo and he tells me about the City of the Dead, an area where the people live in open graves. He and All found it during their journeys in Africa. The impoverished citizens of the City of the Dead live in pits where, years ago, wealthy Egyptians were buried in graves like cupboards. Bono explains that the population of this necropolis "take the refuse of the city, collect it all at night, and take it back to the City of the Dead. Precious things, tin and silver, anything with piping. They use it, they store it, and they burn all that they can't use so the City of the Dead is covered with black smoke, the children have soot on their faces. It is beyond The Road Warrior. It is very dangerous to go there.

"They work with the tin, they are in my opinion related to the Irish tinkers. That name means tin-ker, they used to sharpen the shears and make pots. Nowadays they joyride and they dismantle cars. Metal is the key. The metallurgists in the City of the Dead and the Irish tinkers are the same thing. They're nomadic people and I'm sure they are remnants of the alchemists."

Bono says that Arabic chanting with its bent blues notes, its pentatonic scale, is the brother of the mournful Gaelic singing heard in the west of Ireland. He's sure that in antiquity Ireland and North Africa connected and shared influence through their mutual trade with Spain. He says- that the nautical maps of the ancient Phoenicians are, by today's standards, tipped sideways, with our east at the top, so that what's now Ireland, Spain, and Morrocco are lined up together at the center and given great prominence, while England and France are drawn as obscure hinterlands. As with his theory that rap and hip-hop connect American

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