Alone, in the back seat of the air-conditioned sedan, I hunched by the door, my face pressed to the window, at once excited and apprehensive about the upcoming meeting with my dad. Would I be able to forgive him for abandoning us, for my mother’s drift into madness and death?

Ryu sat in the front seat with the driver. He was on his cell phone again, arguing with someone named Mura. “Fool,” he snarled into the phone. “It is business.”

Yakuza business, I suspected, which had to be nothing worthwhile. I had to remind myself that, handsome as he was, this was no knight in armor, but a yakuza in tattoos. Why in the world would my father send a gangster to fetch me? An uneasy feeling made me squirm in my seat. I tapped Ryu’s broad, suited shoulder. He turned to me, his black eyes narrow and, for a moment, almost cruel.

“Ryu,” I asked warily, “why did my father send you to meet me?”

“Bodyguard,” he said, lips stretching over his teeth in a long gondola of a smile, dark eyes turning squinty with pleasure.

His smile was ominous, but disarming. A flutter of excitement kicked its way into my chest and drifted down into my lap. “Mmmm,” I nodded, more distracted than appeased.

He turned back to his phone, speaking quietly now. I leaned back in the seat and resumed surveying the scenery. By the time we reached the Rainbow Bridge, the magnificent span that arcs from Daiba Beach to Tokyo, the dirty haze had thinned. Sunlight did a spangled dance on the waters of Tokyo Bay. I felt a little like Dorothy did when she first set foot in Oz.

Soon enough we were crawling through the crowded Tokyo streets where pedestrians and vehicles vie for purchase. Large signs looming far overhead promised colorful nights ablaze in a neon extravaganza. Intersections bustled with life. Ancient, modern, wooded, high-tech—Tokyo was a city of contrasts. Ryu seemed to draw energy from the surroundings. I watched his body react physically to them, his movements quickening, his neck and jaw muscles tightening in a way that was almost electric.

My father’s apartment was in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. If the city has a foreign heart, this is it. It’s an international compound, the home of many an expat, a neighborhood full of Japanese antique stores, western-style restaurants, swank hotels and fabulous Roppongi Hills, a high-end, sky-high “village” for the terminally trendy. Dad’s place was on a tree-lined residential street with a park nearby in which a handful of noisy western kids were scooting around on their razors.

“We are here,” announced Ryu, easing out of the car.

To me, Christian Orison is the collegiate young man in my mother’s old photos. Stiff-postured and well dressed, he is fair-haired, handsome, and he looks insufferably arrogant. This is the way I know of him. I also know of him through my mother’s broken heart and a drug habit that sent her to an early grave and me to a series of very formal boarding schools perched on the slopes of mountains or on desolate coasts. We have never met, this father and I. He is the bankroll behind many of the things I despise, and there is no way in hell I would have responded to his summons except for the perfect hook. Baiting a trap, I’ve come to discover, is one of my father’s talents. My lure was no less than an audition with Hiroshi Nakamura, a man I believed to be the greatest choreographer to have walked, danced, or glided upon the face of the planet. I sometimes wonder how the disinterested Christian, who knew so little about me, could have come up with so perfect a snare. Did he actually read the reports penned by my dutiful educators? Did he know about my successes in dance? I’m sure his spies were informed, even if he was not. In my heart, I think, there was a tiny place that hoped that he actually wanted to see me. Hope is a treacherous thing. It can make such a fool out of anyone. So, there I was at the Narita airport, exiting customs, staring at a white card with my name on it in English: “Erin Orison.” Naturally, my father was not there.

If you read the official accounts, you’ll find that Erin Orison, the talented and rebellious only daughter of American ambassador, Christian Orison, died in a Tokyo hospital shortly after her eighteenth birthday. But there is so much more to the story.

First, let me assure you that zombies are REAL. Most people know zombies only as the decomposing corpses that paw hungrily and rather ineffectively at the living in trashy books and B-movies. Some would have you believe that zombies are born of disease or that they come from another planet. Haven’t you noticed how the truth, especially when it is dangerous, is hidden in a pack of lies? That’s how they fool you. They make you laugh. You relax as the magician entertains you and his assistants rob you blind.

But maybe you are different. Perhaps you are a student of history and culture and are a bit more familiar with the truth about zombies. Maybe you’ve read some of the great works on the subject, have heard of the substances that create them. Maybe you know something about the beliefs that rode to the New World in the cargo hulls of ships packed with the bodies of living slaves.

If you have traveled to Haiti, you may even have seen them—these poor, abstracted creatures whose identities have been stolen by an unscrupulous voudoun witchdoctor or bokor. There are those who, for one reason or another, want to possess a creature. Through various methods, which I’ll explain later, these wicked individuals administer a sophisticated “poison.” The victim sickens and dies. But here is the trick:  The victim is not really dead at all; though the symptoms that mimic death and a premature burial in a lightless box are enough to make them think they have breathed their last. Or could their loss of identity be a result of an actual change in body chemistry precipitated by the bokor’s dreadful concoction? Whatever the reason, when the bokor, who is waiting, digs the person up, the poor creature believes it has passed from the realm of the living. Confused, perhaps even mentally damaged, it clings to the bokor.

The murderer becomes the liberator, and the victim becomes a slave.