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A Burden of Flowers

Name: A Burden of Flowers
Author: Natsuki Ikezawa, Alfred Birnbaum
ISBN: 9784770026866

by Natsuki Ikezawa, Alfred Birnbaum

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Overview

"The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist "Tez" Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends, and - "like Dorothy with the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow" - sets off to challenge a shadowy and, to her, very alien situation." "Her brother, languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the two women - one sweet, one sinister - who changed his life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction...and to the day a police stooge planted a cigarette carton filled with heroin in his room in the Kuta Beach "backpack territory" of Bali." Tez's life hangs in the balance, tipped one way by the maneuverings of a dangerous senior police officer, and the other way by the investigative efforts of an undercover agent who, in a powerful climax, is shot and left for dead.

Synopsis

The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist "Tez" Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty, his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of an old expert on Indonesia and two of his friends, and - "like Dorothy with the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow" - sets off to challenge a shadowy and, to her, very alien situation.
Her brother, languishing in jail, thinks back over his journeys in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, to the two women - one sweet, one sinister - who changed his life there, to his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction...and to the day a police stooge planted a cigarette carton filled with heroin in his room in the Kuta Beach "backpack territory" of Bali.
Tez's life hangs in the balance, tipped one way by the maneuverings of a dangerous senior police officer, and the other way by the investigative efforts of an undercover agent who, in a powerful climax, is shot and left for dead.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

A young Japanese woman struggles to spring her brother from an Indonesian prison in Ikezawa's latest, which begins when Kaoru Nishijima learns that her brother, Tez, has been arrested and imprisoned in Bali for heroin possession. When her old-fashioned parents are reluctant to bail out their miscreant son, Kaoru travels to Bali, where she quickly realizes that Tez has been set up by the Indonesian police. With the political deck stacked against her in Bali, she returns to Japan to consult a professor who has extensive connections in Indonesia, but even when he goes to Bali with her to hire a well-connected lawyer, the best they can hope for is to mitigate a prospective death sentence for Tez. While Kaoru fights her uphill battle, Tez reflects on his early success as an illustrator, a "too much too soon" tale that led him straight to a German woman who introduced him to heroin. The Midnight Express plot line will make the first half of this novel seem familiar to many American readers, and the writing dealing with the case is pedestrian though engaging. But Ikezawa (author of the acclaimed short story collection Still Lives) takes a different road once Tez's trial starts, linking Kaoru's accidental exploration of the mysterious Balinese spirituality with the sudden downfall of the corrupt police chief that provides the Nishijimas with a ray of hope. It is the spiritual material and Ikezawa's graceful presentation of Tez's musings about the failure of heroin to provide the artistic revelations he expected that make this a worthwhile read. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The ordeal of a young Japanese artist framed for selling drugs in Indonesia is the subject of this melodramatic prizewinning novel by the author of Still Lives (1987).