The Water Trade

A murdered mother, a desperate daughter, and a Tokyo hostess bar full of secrets. Gena Hunter is determined to ask her mother face-to-face: Why did you abandon our family in Hawaii to run a hostess bar in the red-light district of Tokyo? Did you care that I was seventeen and alone in the emergency room, a suction pump pulling sleeping pills back up?

Her desire for answers comes to an abrupt end when her mother, Emiko, is viciously murdered while closing her bar. The Shinjuku police conclude it’s a robbery that went bad. Gena, however, is convinced that it’s more than that. The killing appears to have been done in rage.

Caught in an internal battle between accepting things as they are, or challenging authority and facing her fears, Gena begins working as a hostess in Japan, at a business she hates, in order to get at the truth to her mother’s death.

Drawn into a maze of lies and secrets, she discovers it’s all about a video-a video that Emiko was rumored to be using to blackmail a powerful yakuza boss. Gena finds herself on a collision course with a serial killer out for revenge and power, and the yakuza leader’s obsession with bondage and immortality.

Her father is missing at sea. The Shinjuku police are accusing her of murdering a teenage girl. Gena will have to seek her own justice, in a quest for the truth that will turn her life upside down.