own antiques business in Tokyo and runs it from
Hugh Glendinning’s apartment. While searching
for a specific tansu chest—a piece of furniture—for
a client, she is enveloped in a murder mystery. The
tansu plays a central role in the story, which also
involves a depiction of Zen Buddhist practices and
traditions, especially from a gendered perspective.
In The Flower Master (1999), Hugh Glendinning
leaves for Scotland, and Rei remains alone to run
her business. She is enrolled in a flower arrange-
ment class taught by her aunt, Norie Shimura.
Soon there is a murder in the class and Norie is
one of the suspected. The story revolves again
around family honor and love, but it also deals
with international environmental activism and
the status of the Korean minority in Japan. In The
Floating Girl (2000), Rei is commissioned to write
about the extremely popular Japanese cartoons,
the manga, for a Japanese magazine for foreigners.
Soon a person interviewed by Rei gets murdered,
and Rei is inevitably involved in the case. With her
boyfriend Takeo Kayama, she tries to interpret and
understand the mystery of the manga, especially
the issue of sexuality in the Mars Girl series.
The setting moves to the United States in The
Bride’s Kimono (2001), in which Rei accepts a sur-
prising and enticing offer to transport a collec-
tion of priceless antique kimonos from Japan to a
museum in Washington, D.C. However, one of the
kimonos—the bride’s kimono—is stolen, and Rei
loses her passport only to find it along with a dead
Japanese woman from the group she was travel-
ing with. She has no choice but to solve the case.
She is assisted by her parents and by her former
lover, Hugh Glendinning, with whom a relation-
ship develops once more. The plot revolves around
issues of prostitution, romance, and international
smuggling of antiques. In The Samurai’s Daughter
(2003), Rei stays with her parents in San Francisco
and researches her own family’s history through
the antiques they possess. When Hugh Glendin-
ning is asked to pursue a class action lawsuit on be-
half of people forced into slave labor for Japanese
companies during World War II, Rei’s research and
Glendinning’s lawsuit project become intertwined
in unexpected ways. In Pearl Diver (2004), Rei lives
in Washington, D.C., with Hugh Glendinning. Rei
is asked to decorate a new Japanese restaurant in
the city. Her cousin Kendall is kidnapped, and Rei
manages to solve the incident, only later to be ab-
ducted herself. The novel returns to the topic of the
status of the biracial children between American
military servicemen and Japanese women. Having
Hugh as her boyfriend is one thing, but it is another
when Rei ponders marriage and motherhood.
In The Typhoon Lover (2005), the setting is
again Japan, where Rei is acting on an under-
cover U.S. government assignment. A valuable
ancient vessel, an ibex ewer, has been stolen from
an Iraqi museum in Baghdad, and it is believed
to be in Japan. The narrative is closely linked to
contemporary international politics and the occu-
pation of Iraq, and it evolves also around natural
catastrophes as a severe typhoon hits Japan. The
main focus is, however, on Rei and her complex,
ambiguous character. Breaking up with Hugh, she
meets again with her former boyfriend Takeo, who
is suspected of having the stolen item in his collec-
tion. In the ninth novel in the series, Girl in a Box
(2006), Rei works undercover as a clerk in a large
department store in Tokyo. Hired again by a U.S.
government agency, her task is to solve a murder
and fraud case.
One intriguing aspect of these novels is that
despite Massey’s background as an Indo-Euro-
pean, or a Euro-Indian, the novels scarcely explore
these cultural spheres. Whether set in Japan or the
United States, the novels concentrate on Japanese
culture. That Massey has chosen to write about
Japan raises questions of identity, representation,
and cultural authenticity common in postcolonial
detective fiction. However, despite the choice of
specific settings, Massey’s works have a universal
appeal since they examine the questions of cross-
cultural identity shared by many people in the
postcolonial world.Bibliography
D’haen, Theo. “Samurai Sleuths and Detective
Daughters, The American Way.” In Sleuthing Eth-
nicity: The Detective in Multiethnic Crime Fiction,
edited by Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and MonikaMassey, Sujata 183