"Budding artist May Parker is captivated by the Japanese exhibits at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and longs to know more about her mother's heritage--which her mother refuses to speak of because of the heartache she left behind in Japan. Wanting to experience more of the exhibits, May works as a Camera Girl--but her curiosity leads her into danger when a suit of samurai armor becomes the target of an elusive art forger. After ten years apart,...

In this genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms, the author, after the death of her father, grapples with her bipolar disorder and sets out to interrogate the very notion of recovery through the lens of figures from Japanese, Taiwanese and Okinawan legend.