Tokyo. It's autumn. The maple leaves will soon turn red, orange, and yellow.

Tomoyuki Kawayama, a detective for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, is thinking about taking an annual trip with his wife, Mizuko, to a mountain hot spring when his chief tells him to go to a Kabuki-cho love hotel to investigate the murder of a young woman.

The murder will turn his world upside down.

Nothing has prepared him for what he will learn when he enters the love hotel room, where the young woman's body rests on the floor. Her death forces him to reflect on his role as a father, his marriage, what it means to be Japanese, and Japanese society itself, where shame and reputation control so many, enabling the yakuza to extort millions of yen from company men who have something to hide. It is Japanese society that has, in so many ways, murdered this young woman.

A Prodigal Daughter takes readers on a journey not only through the streets, corporate offices, and clubs of Tokyo, but it also paints an intimate portrait of Japanese married and family life. Guilt-ridden, Detective Kawayama has much to reveal about the police, Japanese society, the yakuza, his marriage, and, yes, himself.

Chapter One (Excerpt)

My name is Kawayama Tomoyuki. I am a homicide detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and I have a story to tell, but it has less to do with the crime my team and I solved than it has to do with me and the shame I have felt for several years. That shame, the assignment of it, is something that I hadn't come to terms with until I wrote this story. In the West, there are psychologists and counselors who help people in situations that I found myself, even ones in police departments, from what I've heard; but in Japan we don't have that kind of culture. We keep our emotions hidden, and this eats away at us at times. Every culture has its failings, and this, I now know, is one of Japan's. I am, or was, a prisoner of Japanese culture. I faced the shame as stoically as I could, in the spirit of a samurai warrior. I'm proud of that bushido spirit, even if I know how damaging it can be. Many Japanese self-destruct, confronting shame by wearing the proper face to get through the day. Men often resort to alcohol and carousing hostess bars. Women have affairs. Or they drink, too. They're called “kitchen drinkers.”

The person I needed to confess to the most to relieve the burden of that shame was my wife, Mizuko. We've been married for more than twenty-five years. She needed to know what I learned while my team investigated, and solved, the murder, but I just didn't have it in me to tell her until the killer was found dead in a flophouse in Osaka. A brave man who has the bushido spirit was convicted of the murder. I admire him tremendously. He was not the killer.