Lessons from the Stacks: Ninja
This week's Lesson from the Stacks comes from Stephen Hayes's NINJA Volume II and NINJA Volume III.

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I don't know why a primarily medical library has two books on how to be a ninja, but I'm glad it does; reshelving books is dull, and the best way to make it fun is to pretend that you're really a secret book ninja, familiarising yourself with your weapons and environment for the time when you'll need to start running sideways up bookshelves or spinning hardbacks across the room to bury them in the wall. The NINJA volumes are a big help in this, covering everything from "yoga-like body conditioning exercises" and "short stick fighting" to "ninja "secret knowledge" of the universe" (quotation marks in original) and "energy channeling".

For any other purposes, it's a slightly bemusing series, alternating arresting passages (I enjoy the categorisation of invisibility into invisibility achieved by preventing light from reflecting from you, invisibility achieved by taking away the perceiver's ability to see, and invisibility achieved by disguise) with sections on how to balance electromagnetic power fields using secret hand movements (here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and unleash a blazing torrent of focused energy into the faces of the people). It also insists that ninjas' reactions to their surroundings should take one of five classic forms: air, earth, fire, water and heart void, and that if you are a ninja harnessing the power of earth, for example, "you are the junior high school principal confronted by a thirteen-year-old troublemaker who did not expect you to come upon him. Your natural feeling is one of total power that can handle all and the needs to fear nothing." (The completion of the implicit "Captain Planet, he's a ninja / Gonna take the villains and them injure" song is left as an exercise to the reader.)

As the high-school principal example demonstrates, this is a modern take on the concept of ninjas. Mr Hayes discourages his readers from sticking to old traditions where these are no longer relevant:

Obviously, moving through the street in a robe with a red basket on one's head while playing a bamboo flute is no longer the best way to blend in, even in rural Japan.

He is therefore careful to demonstrate how his ninja moves can be applied to the modern world. He shows, for example, the steps of a forward roll, and then photographs of its practical application. While in the time of the original ninjas a forward roll might have been used to dive from a crumbling stone bridge onto the top of a passing carriage containing the kidnapped daughter of a warrior lord, nowadays it can be used to get out of a car:



Similarly, he shows you how to do a sideways handspring. While these might have been used in the past to vault across precarious turrets toward the bedroom of your victim without dropping your blowpipe, the modern ninja is more likely to use them to cross the road:



Like last week's ECG Interpretation Made Incredibly Easy, NINJA contains exercises allowing the aspirant ninja/ECG interpreter to monitor his or her progress.

Exercise one: Meditate on the frailty, ever-degenerating vitality and impurity of the human body.

Exercise Four: Meditate on the fleeting transiency of the self in the universal scheme.

Exercise Ten: Imagine you are in the future looking back at the present, which will appear as the past from your viewpoint in the imaginary future.

Unfortunately the answers seem to be somewhere in the missing Volumes I and IV, so I don't really know how I'm going, and I haven't even started on my favourite, Exercise Three from Volume III:

For reasons of investigative work, personal privacy or professional need, comb through your own background to find the root characteristics that will permit you to create three distinct, alternate identities for yourself.

Although it's no longer 1980, Stephen Hayes still seems to be around and a ninja, selling ninja-look pants cuffs which you can wrap around the legs of your trousers to make them look more ninja-y. I don't know whether they work with skirts, though. Maybe if you buy the XL for "extremely large calf size" and just put both legs into it at once.