Uncertain Luck

Another novel of international love and intrigue by the prize-winning author of A Hundred Veils.

In 1969 Japan, Emiko's father has gone to Tokyo to support students protesting the Vietnam War-but hasn't come back. Then suddenly her mother dies. Alone and in despair, twenty-year-old Emiko abandons her factory job to go searching for her missing father.

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 finding her father when 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.

Uncertain Luck provides a vivid picture of the persistence of love at a time of political conflict in Japan.

A large part of Rea Keech's career has been teaching international students in college, including at the University of Tehran (Peace Corps assignment), the University of South Carolina, Voorhees College, schools in Japan and Greece, and the community college in Maryland, where he now lives. He is a retired Professor of World Literature and Linguistics. In Japan, Keech taught English from 1969 to 1971. Uncertain Luck is his second novel set outside of the United States. The title refers to the vaguest prediction possible on an omikuji fortune paper that one gets at a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple in Japan.