While sports fans' attention is focused on Ichiro Suzuki of Seattle Mariners baseball fame, the exploits of Ichiro Sano, the Tokugawa shogunate's "Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations and People," are being cheered by enthusiasts of mystery fiction.
The year is 1693, and the scene of the crime is a top-ranked courtesan's boudoir in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters, where Lord Mitsuyoshi -- the man about to be named the handpicked successor to the childless shogun, Tsunayoshi -- is found dead, a woman's hairpin thrust through his eye into his brain.
Investigator Sano launches a dragnet for the courtesan, Wisteria, who has mysteriously disappeared along with her missing "pillow book." Naturally, suspects are in abundance: Wisteria's regular patron, Lord Makino; her yarite (procuress), the owner of the hairpin; Fujio, a wandering balladeer who was Wisteria's former lover; and a seemingly endless stream of characters with their own apparent motives for doing away with the dashing young Mitsuyoshi.