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Early this morning, several hours before my arrest, I was woken by an earth tremor. I mention the incident not to suggest that there was a connection - that somehow the fault lines in my life came crashing together in the form of a couple of policemen - for in Tokyo we have a quake like this every month. I am simply relating the sequence of events as it happened. It has been an unusual day and I would hate to forget anything.
So begins The Earthquake Bird, a novel set in Japan which reveals a murder on its first page and takes its readers into the mind of the chief suspect, Lucy Fly - a young vulnerable English girl living and working in Tokyo as a translator. As Lucy is interrogated by the police she reveals her past to the reader, and it is a past which is dangerously ambiguous and compromising.
