A crow's laugh is hearty and deep. If you hear it while walking the streets it is easy to mistake the direction where it comes from, because it seems to come from a throat much bigger than the crow itself. This is not an insignificant thing to say, considering the extraordinary size of these creatures; they are, from beak to tail, bigger than most chihuahuas. From wing to wing they are bigger than a three-year-old. Strangers might think we were used to them, seeing them perched on the edge of billboards and rooftops, not even flinching in the slightest at the onset of their fearsome laughs. I assure you the opposite: their laugh, at least to our ancestors, was the sound of triumph, of renewal of the human race, which is why, some say, the gods let the crows laugh with the voices of man.

It was those voices which filled the news broadcasts of that dreadful crash on the Shuto expressway last Sunday, where more than two dozen cars (mostly sedans carrying affluent out-of-town commuters) were piled up onto each other in what the papers that night branded as the worst automobile disaster in the greater metropolitan area in thirty-three years. Bodies were crumpled into metal layers; blood and oil mixed freely in the streets. Eyewitnesses, eager for their thirty seconds of fame, soon took to TV screens, and it was thus determined that a lorry carrying industrial lubricant had swerved across four lanes of traffic shortly before rush hour, leading to the event. People were incensed. The net called for greater traffic protections in place. What was little-reported (and some say, hushed-up) was a few scattered clips of the footage itself, reconstructed from grainy dashcam feeds. The authorities said the driver died in the crash, but these feeds, zoomed into the lorry cab and processed with stabilising software, show only a black baby-sized shape hunched over the wheel, its mouth wide open, as if it was laughing at the funniest thing in the world.

The same shape (maybe slightly bigger) was also recorded flying into an exposed transformer in West Ogikubo during repair works after a heat wave; the resultant fire gutted five buildings before running against the city's natural firebreaks. They were filmed circling the bay before that storm that nearly burst the city's detention tanks in October. And the explosion aboard the Philippines-bound Hoseimaru that Christmas Day was precipitated, survivors say, by the sudden appearance of foreign flying objects in the engine room, which, in the panic that ensued, caused the malfunction of at least one crucial generator. By the following year what had begun as rumour on the net had found its course into print and the TV screen. Pedestrians took to the malls or sheltered walkways, or carried clear plastic umbrellas even on days that did not rain. Local police stations invested in large nets. Municipalities, incongruously, banned the flying of electronic drones. But that was too little, and too late, and the subsequent failure of the drainage system in the Fukushima Daiichi sarcophagus was punctuated, miles away, by sounds of ca-ca, ca-cau -- the deep throaty laughter of the crows.

I remember watching the news that night with my mother, whose eyes were glued to our television screen. She gripped the sofa so tightly with her fingers that I thought they were growing to break. Her eyes were bulging from her sockets, and her legs were drawn up into what I assumed was an orthopedically-corrective squat. Then she turned to me, and I heard a snapping sound. She opened her mouth and the sound that came out, strained as though squeezed from her poor dry throat, was the unmistakable voice of a man, laughing from a place behind her armchair, laughing from a million miles away.