About This Book
Ryuujin Hashimoto’s seventh birthday should be a joyful occasion. Instead, his parents are murdered by five men who break into their modest home in Tacoma, WA, as the young boy hides under the kitchen table. The boy finds a new home in Tokyo with his uncle, Jiro Asano, an influential aikido master and director of the Cabinet Research Chamber (postwar Japan’s CIA). Asano recognizes in his nephew the potential of a skillful assassin and trains him expressly for that purpose, encouraging him to eschew all emotional attachments that might distract him. Dressed head to toe in the bloodstained rags he has sewn together from his parents’ clothes, Ryuujin transforms himself into the fearsome killer the news media dubs Raggedy Man. His service to Asano brings him into deadly conflict with foes across the globe, including the American Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. But he remains obsessed with the two decade mystery of who killed his parents and why. Closing in on the truth at last, he finds the man who holds the shocking answers to that day, and he extracts terrible revenge. The lives of two others, Cody Kiegan and Maureen Tanaka, run parallel to Ryuujin’s quest and provide support in their own unique ways. Cody, a grade school friend of Ryuujin’s, enlists in the Air Force to escape an abusive home life. He is assigned duty in Korea and Japan, flying NSA intercept missions off the coast of Siberia. Maureen, the Eurasian daughter of a Russian diplomat and his Japanese interpreter, is a willful young woman with a strong sense of justice. She is an apt student of aikido and eventually becomes the confidant of Ryuujin. Their intertwining lives soon converge to resolve the mystery plaguing Ryuujin.
