Rector's assistant Owen Mathias, a young and average sensualist, gradually stumbles on the considerable connections his church in Kobe, Japan, has to atrocities committed by Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare research center in Harbin, Manchuria, during World War II. Mathias's discoveries toss him into theodicy's deepest pit, savaging his faith and pinballing him among the vapid convictions of his rector, the pieties of ex-pat parishioners, the bitter doubts of an American missionary couple, the placid sexuality of his Japanese girlfriend, and the fey manipulations of Japanese witnesses trying to reveal and contain and explain the story. The Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe in 1995 underscores the theological writhings Mathias undergoes and his emergence as an ambivalent and comic soldier for Christ.

John Zeugner, Emeritus Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, has published short stories inliterary magazines. A recipient of a Discovery Grant for fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has over the course of three decades taught American Studies in Japan--at Osaka and Kobe Universities, Keio University, and Kobe Women's College.