Killer publishes book recounting his two years spent on the run

While on the run for more than two years, the Japanese man wanted for the murder of British woman Lindsay Ann Hawker cut into his lower lip, dug two moles out of his cheek with a craft knife and gave himself a nose job in an attempt to obscure his identity.

The disclosures come in a book released yesterday by Tatsuya Ichihashi - written while he was in prison - who will stand trial later this year for the murder and rape of Ms Hawker, 22, his English teacher.

She was found dead in a sand-filled bath on the balcony of Ichihashi's apartment in Chiba, east of Tokyo, in March 2007.

Ichihashi, arrested in 2009 after a lengthy manhunt, admits to taking Ms Hawker's life in the book, Until the Arrest. But he doesn't describe the crime or his motives, instead detailing his life while he was at large, during which he travelled up and down the country, in constant fear of arrest and obsessed with cosmetic surgery.

While police say Ichihashi has confessed to assaulting Ms Hawker and that she died from her injuries, he won't enter a plea until the trial begins. The details in the book do not take responsibility for anything beyond what Ichihashi has already told investigators. If convicted of murder, he could face the death penalty.

After escaping the police who came to his apartment to question him, he bound up his nose with a thread and needle to make it narrower.

At first, Ichihashi, 32, wandered around Tokyo and then drifted north to Aomori prefecture, where he cut off part of his lower lip to make it thinner.

He wore several layers of surgical masks to hide the scars, but apparently didn't stand out in the spring when many Japanese do the same to escape pollen.

Moving by train and bus, Ichihashi headed south and toured temples in the south-western island of Shikoku, wishing Ms Hawker could "come back to life" - an idea he got from a novel, in which the dead are resurrected after someone thinking of them visits the same temples.

"I took Lindsay's life, that fact does not change," he wrote in the 238-page book. Its cover depicts a drawing by Ichihashi of himself, wearing a baseball cap and a surgical mask.

While at large, Ichihashi avoided CCTV cameras and didn't make eye contact with anyone. He changed his location quickly and often when he thought he might have been spotted. He never contacted his family or friends.

Police offered a reward of $120,000 for tips leading to his arrest. Once he walked past a police station and saw a wanted poster with his face on it.It was then he sliced off the moles on his left cheek, which were prominent in the wanted picture.

Having saved nearly $12,000 from a string of construction jobs, he spent most of it on two plastic surgery operations.

But in the end, his attempts to obscure his identity led to his arrest.

Staff at the second clinic he used took many photos of his left cheek with traces of moles he had removed, which seemed "strange". The clinic reported his visit and sent the photos to police - details that were splashed in Japanese newspapers.

Ichihashi said he froze when he saw the news on TV about his cosmetic surgery.

"My heart raced," he wrote. "I gazed at it trembling."

He was eventually stopped on 10 November, 2009, by police at the ferry terminal in Osaka as he tried to flee again.

In his book, Ichihashi apologises to Ms Hawker and her family, saying that the book was intended to be "a gesture of contrition for the crime I committed".