Burns Bannion is back on another assignment: the fleshpots of YOSHIWARA—the age-old home of prostitution in the middle of Tokyo. . . The young and voluptuous Hiroko puts Bannion on the tracks of her older sister, who has been savagely beaten to death by Bannion's own weapon— KARATE, the deadly method of Japanese fighting in which the human hand can be as lethal as a knife blade. Before he's finished in YOSHIWARA, Bannion has more corpses lying around than you'd care to count. . .

"Lust will not keep…Something must be done about it."--inscription at the entrance to Yoshiwara For over a hundred years the Western world has heard whispers of the pleasure city, Yoshiwara, set behind its walls in the city of Edo itself, which is today called Tokyo. Here was an eastern red light district, the place for the hedonists, the woman-seekers, the sensual plasure-hunters of old Japan. There, behind moated walls, an erotic Japanese world unmatched by the West was created by beautiful courtesans, geishas, dancers, actors, and artists. To this "floating world" came the hedonists and the sensual pleasure hunters of old Japan. Many myths and legends encircled the secrets of the Yoshiwara, and still do. In time other Japanese cities tried to copy the original, sometimes even calling their district for geishas and courtesans and pretty waitress girls a Yoshiwara. Stephen and Ethel Longstreet use prints and fascinating original sources to trace the rise and fall of this city within a city, a sanctioned preserve of teahouses and brothels that was not abolished until 1958, sketching a vivid, no-holds-bared portrait of social and sexual mores in Japan's capital.

Yoshiwara, the centuries-old pleasure quarter in Tokyo, is the backdrop for a story set in Japan on the eve of the Second World War, where an American journalist, recruited by the Office of Naval Intelligence becomes entangled in a web of espionage and murder that includes; a woman sold to a bordello in Yoshiwara, who falls in love with the journalist; a female serial killer, who stalks and kills patrons of Yoshiwara; a husband and wife, members of Japan's outcast society, the Burakumin, who agree to work for ONI in exchange for safe passage out of Japan; and an officer in the Japanese secret police, the Kempei Tai, who suspects that the journalist and the Burakumin couple are spies.