An intelligent, cosmopolitan novel set in the exotic surroundings of
Bali and alive with suspense, drug intrigue, courtroom drama and
political tension, A Burden of Flowers is based on a true story of
the 1980s. The action centers on Asia-traveling Japanese artist "Tez"
Nishijima and his Europhile sister Kaoru. When Tez is arrested in
Bali on charges of heroin trafficking and faces the death penalty,
his parents are paralyzed with shame, leaving his Paris-based sister
to come to the rescue. She enlists the help of a retired professor
and two old Indonesian friends of his, and--"like Dorothy with her
Tinman, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow"--sets off to challenge a very
foreign and corrupt Indonesian legal system. Tez, languishing in
jail, reflects back on his travels through Thailand, Cambodia, and
Vietnam, the women he encountered along the way, his estrangement
from Japan, his subsequent slow spiral into drug addiction . .. and
the night a police informer planted a cigarette carton filled with
200 gms of heroin in his bungalow in the Kuta Beach "backpacker
territory" of Bali. During the trial, it transpires that the police
want to make a show of the case in response to pressure from the U.S.
Drug Administration in advance of a visit by the American President.
Kaoru finds herself up against a drug-dealing police lieutenant who
orders her "disappeared" and, in a cinematic climax, she is shot and
wounded and, together with a tape implicating the police, goes
underground. . .. A Burden of Flowers is both a pan-Asian adventure
that will appeal to readers familiar with "The Beach," and a
cutting-edge portrait of the "New Asia" in which Japan, the long-lost
economically spoiled child, is now struggling to find itself.
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