Severin Boxx is the son of an Air Force pilot and lives on an Air Force base in Japan. The year is 1989. Severin is a muscular, earnest 17 year-old who plays on the base's football team. He loves - from afar - Virginia Kindwall, the daughter of the general who runs the base. Virginia, whose Japanese mother died in childbirth while her father served in Vietnam, is tough ans sophisticated beyond her years. She has fallen in with the Japanese underground and her dealings result in her disappearance and Severin's forced return to the United States.
The novel then moves to the present day; Severin, now in his early thirties, is the husband of a star psychoanalyst who is on the faculty of the University of Chicago. The marriage is weak, and gets worse when a postcard arrives from General Kindwall, now dying in a hospital in Vietnam, asking Severin to find his daughter before he dies. The postcard helps precipitate a crisis in the marriage; Severin's ill-advised affair with one of his wife's patients makes things all the worse.
Adrift, Severin travels to Vietnam, visits the general, and promises to find his daughter, who is rumoured to be living in the mountains of Japan - or is it the alleyways of industrial Tokyo? When he returns to Tokyo he must confront the city of his youth and search for Virginia, who is neither expecting him nor prepared for his sudden re-appearance in her life.
