When Jane decides to leave her Wall Street job to join her husband in Japan during its economic bubble, she expects to surf Tokyo’s financial tsunami. However, she unwittingly places herself on a trajectory that challenges her marriage, her career, her assumptions about herself and risks her very life. Hers is an emotional journey of love and betrayal, of hope and disillusionment as she confronts treachery, and discovers the brutal secret of a Japanese family. Complex and unexpected plot twists engage a reader’s attention as the finely crafted writing evokes the time and place of Tokyo in 1987. Bitter Tea is an elegant character driven portrait of desire caught in the vortex of financial manipulation and lasting wartime conflicts.
PROLOGUE
The body was not a pleasant sight, and Sergeant Fujii grimaced as he looked at what once might have been considered an attractive man. Attractive for a gaijin, that is. His officers found a wallet in the pocket of the man’s trousers, so Fujii ruled out robbery. A murder-robbery rarely happens in Tokyo, but he had to be certain in case there were any questions from his superior. Questions, yes, there will be questions, he thought. This is all so inconvenient. The hour was too late—or too early—for the trains to run, and therefore it was quiet near where the splayed body lay. Small shops and noodle stalls that serviced drunken salarymen on their return home were shuttered, their colorful banners tucked inside. Even the sex acts in Kabukicho had ended. The alley was dark and abandoned, save for the police who stood in silence. They struggled to remain at attention despite the fetid odors of urine and vomit brewed by summer heat from the remains of the day. At night there was no relief from Tokyo’s suffocating humidity.
Trying not to soil his newly polished leather shoes in the pool of the deceased’s blood that ran into the foul stew left by salarymen in the alley, Inspector Honda gingerly stepped around the body to improve his perspective. The corpse did not appear to have been run over by a train, as there were no crushed bones or mangled body parts. He might be wrong, however, having conducted only a cursory inspection of the body. Use of forensic science was not well developed. Murder of a gaijin was unusual in Japan. The most likely conclusion was that the foreigner had died of injuries sustained from a suicide jump in front of a train. He would check accident reports for the line. It was curious the body was so far from the tracks. How would he have crawled this far?
Inspector Honda’s order to take the body to the morgue moved Sergeant Fujii and his men to welcome action. An embassy would have to be contacted and a relative found and notified, but that chore was not his. Fortunately, he did not speak English. The task of dealing with foreigners would fall to someone else.
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Entrepreneur Mark Weston
An author, playwright, puzzle maker, lawyer, and Jeopardy winner, put them all together and you have Mark Weston, an Armonk resident off and on for 40 years.
He has been a lawyer for ABC Television and a journalist for ABC News and written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.
Mark’s current projects include a hybrid board-computer game that combines the best elements of “Risk” and “Trivial Pursuit.” The game is intended for adults with a slight variation for children.
The subject of his published books are Pakistan, Japan and his latest: Prophets and Princes – Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present.
While researching his latest book, Mark was a visiting scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. Read the introduction on our Local Authors Page.
In pursuit of new ideas, Weston is seeking a partner to manufacture children’s multiplication tables as placemats.
Once the weather turns nice, you can find Mark swimming and kayaking daily in Windmill Lake.
Local author Peter Limburg has published almost two dozen books over the past four decades, dealing with topics ranging from engines to corn, aquaculture, poison ivy, words and their origins and stories, and marine science and technology. He says that his favorite part of writing is the research.
In his most recent book, Deep-Sea Detectives: Maritime Mysteries and Forensic Science, Limburg diligently trawled the Internet for information via Google, among many other sources, including a couple of face-to-face interviews with the man who owns the remains of the ill-fated liner Lusitania. Read a chapter of this book on The Local Author Page.
Peter Limburg is like a walking encyclopedia who delights in word play, though he would not describe himself that way. During a typical conversation, he can't resist sparring with his listeners, engaging with anyone who is willing to converse. While discussing the almost obsolete typewriter and how he still uses it for addressing envelopes, one can almost envision him at his desk punching the keys and swearing when he makes a bad strike.
Limburg's hobbies are gardening, hiking, canoeing, and fishing. His favorite reading is sci-fi, which he considers the most imaginative and thoughtful genre today. He also loves history and biography. His favorite music is ragtime and classical New Orleans jazz.
He has been married (to the same wife) for 57 years, has four children and six grandchildren, and has lived in the same home in North Castle for 53 years with four different addresses, courtesy of the Post Office.
A long-time environmentalist and conservationist, he serves on the North Castle Conservation Board.
