She introduced me to her husband, Charles, a silver-haired man who had the sharp, angled look of a corporate warrior.

His style quickly makes a statement that the 36-year-old manager is not your typical dark-suited corporate warrior.

Into the wee hours, at two locations in the heart of Midtown, it offers corporate warriors, Broadway stars and savvy club hoppers alike the bliss of shiatsu-Swedish massage in the ambience of an ancient Asian monastery.

In the days of Japan's economic boom, the nation's corporate warriors would fly off to their latest conquest in the lavish first-class or business-class sections of Japan Airlines.

He had already made other formidable leaps: from Welshman to American grunt in Vietnam; from CBS newsman to CBS chairman; and from Japanese corporate warrior to British knight of the realm.

Many laid-off corporate warriors have lowered their expectations of work itself.

This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors.

This is a corporate warrior's office, and the interviewee's going to be left in no doubt about it.

Like many social phenomena in Japan, the collapsing status of the corporate warrior has generated its own vocabulary.

And that, finally, may be the charm of this book: a corporate warrior with such frankness is a rare bird indeed.