Uncertain Luck

Uncertain Luck is a novel set in Japan during the Vietnam War. The title refers to the least helpful prediction one can get from an omikuji fortune paper from a Shinto temple or Buddhist shrine.

Emiko's mother has died and her father is missing. In despair, the twenty-year-old abandons her factory job to go searching for her father in Tokyo. It is 1969, and her father has left to help with student protests against the war in Vietnam. This gives Emiko a lead to start her search.

To survive in Tokyo, she stays at a hostel in the seedy Sanya neighborhood and takes a job as hostess in a bar where she's required to "talk cute," which goes against her grain.

She's previously refused an offer to become the second wife of the rich Genji, twice her age, who had been in love with her mother, but when she's fired and out of money, in desperation she goes to Genji's office, hoping for a loan. Genji has something else in mind.

Emiko nearly gives up the idea of finding her father. And then she meets Juan, an American soldier recovering from a battle injury. Now she's in love with a soldier in the war she and her father have been denouncing for years.