Winner of the Mishima Prize

In a small fishing village, the new police chief's teenage daughter listens to the locals who come to her father with bottles of liquor and stories to tell, reading into their words and poring over the silence they leave behind. As conflicting accounts of horrific violence-including a dangerous attempt to save some indentured Korean coal mine workers from the Japanese military police and the fate of a group of Chinese refugees-come in and out of focus, she sets out for the Bay, where the tide has recently turned red and an ominous boat from the past has suddenly reappeared.

Populated by an infectious cast of characters that includes a solemn drunk with a burden to bear; a scarred woman constantly tormented by the local kids' fireworks; a lone communist; and the "Silica Four," a group of out-of-work men who love to gossip-Masatsugu Ono's Mishima Prize-winning novel is a masterful epic in village miniature: proof again that there are no small stories-and that the echoes of history's untreated wounds return again and again.