Today's Runners And Writers: The Six Shortlisted For The William Hill Sports Book Of The Year

ANGRY WHITE PYJAMAS: AN OXFORD POET TRAINS WITH THE TOKYO RIOT POLICE BY ROBERT TWIGGER (INDIGO PRESS, pounds 6.99)

WINNERS OF the Newdigate Prize for Poetry include John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde. It is a reasonably safe bet that, unlike the 1985 winner, none of them went on to sign up for the aikido course to which the Japanese Old Bill are subjected. Well, dear old Oscar, possibly.

Robert Twigger was washed up in two rooms in Fuji Heights, with Chris the tax avoidance genius and Fat Frank, a former wrestler and belly dancer. His way out of the torpor and aimlessness was to sign up for a year's exploration of all the pain available to man.

The style of aikido was "Yoshinkan", which translates literally as "the place of the spirit", but in his first lesson, "it felt like there were bombs going off all over the place, that I was back in some nightmarish First World War scenario." The teacher tells them that when he started training, he made his will. "I wanted to be prepared to die," he said.

In the first week, one of Twigger's colleagues suffered a minor seizure, and it soon transpired that the only reason for leaving the mat without permission was to throw up - if you did not make it to the toilet, it was acceptable to open your dogi top and be sick into that. As body and spirit hardened (and it was the spirit the teachers were truly working on), Twigger grew almost to become a "connoisseur" of pain. Not that he had much choice: "One policeman who suffered a mild heart attack during training was sent back from the club with a curt `weak' written on his report."

Though Twigger writes mostly about the course and its colourful characters, there are some evocative vignettes of Japanese society, particularly his hesitant relationship with an indigenous girlfriend and a terrifying excursion into Japanese dentistry. Jay McInerney's novel Ransom covered the same kind of territory, but Twigger's book is not only better written, it also has the virtue of authenticity. Perhaps a more marginal "sports" book than others on the shortlist, Angry White Pyjamas is none the less a page-turning account of the indestructibility of the human spirit.