THE SAMURAI’S DAUGHTER

Catastrophe magnet Rei Shimura (The Bride’s Kimono, 2001, etc.) once again attracts trouble, this time while working on something as seemingly innocent as documenting her family’s history. When the American-born, Tokyo-based antiques buyer flies home to San Francisco to interview her father Toshiro, a psychiatrist, she finds that he and her shopaholic mother Catherine have graciously taken in a shy medical student, Manami Okada. Toshiro is loathe to discuss a scroll he sold from the Emperor to a forebear, and the ultraconservative Manami is upset when Rei’s almost-fiancé, international lawyer Hugh Glendinning, who is mounting a class-action suit seeking reparations from deep-pocketed Japanese companies for the Asians they forced into slave labor and prostitution during WWII, is housed in the bedroom next to her. Then one of Hugh’s contacts, former “comfort woman” Rosa Munoz, is murdered; Manami vanishes; and Hugh and Rei must hie back to Tokyo to find the connection. Scarcely one plane behind are greedy lawyer Charles Sharp and his smarmy translator Eric Gan. When Rei’s suspicions lead her to burgle their hotel rooms, she’s arrested and deported. Back in San Francisco, she puts her antiques savvy to good use in unraveling some of the motives and relationships key to the puzzle as she contemplates her new life as a deportee.

For all the densely woven texture, there are a few too many dangling threads. Regrettably, the most interesting of them, the geopolitical ramifications of war reparations, gets short-changed in the end.