Tokyo Faces Series

She was 15 when she met him on the snowy mountain. He was a charming young man from the city, and he swept her away. She moved to Tokyo for him, full of hope. Then one day, she was betrayed; her own elder sister raped and murdered by the very man she loved. And not long after, he was found dead in a ritual killing.

An unforgettable, breathless debut fiction by author Vann Chow, The Pachinko Girl is the winning selection of an international book award online with over 140,000 submissions. While the book appears to be a murder mystery, the author explores and exposes a slew of human rights issues such as gender inequality, hyper-sexualization of teens, homosexual discrimination, racial discrimination, and workplace bullying among others in Japan through the eyes of a foreigner with his friends from different walks of lives and professions in her seminal debut fiction series.

An erotic art house movie The Beginning of the End, directed by famous Frenchman Sergey Ribery, was released in Japan to critical acclaim. Little did the audience know that Misa Hayami, the actress in the movie, had died in a freak accident during filming. Its director Sergey was also murdered in what appears to be a ritual killing.

The Secrets of the Pachinko Girl is the third book of the four-part crime thriller series. The story follows a cast of characters Carson Smith, the middle-aged American businessman, Tanaka Ryuuji, the disillusioned movie director, and Itsuki Miyazaki, the corrupted detective, in their journey across Japan to uncovering the secrets behind a series of murders involving Misa Hayami and her biological father, Doctor Hasegawa.

She was 15 when she met him on the snowy mountain. He was a charming young man from the city and he swept her feet away. She moved to Tokyo for him full of hope. Then one day he was murdered. To avoid being suspected, she had to disappear in the crowd.