Janet lives an ordinary life as a school bus driver and babysitter to her grandchildren. But one day when she enters a bus used by a co-worker, who had not shown up for work, she finds a dead body. That loose cannon of a detective just wont listen to her that she had nothing to do with the crime and even tries to drag her daughter into the mess too! Worse yet the real killer decides to come after her when the evidence starts to show in her favor. Can her life get any crazier than this?

Until a recent “boom,” Shimao Toshio, writer of short fiction, critic, and essayist, was not widely known, even in Japan. He has never won the Akutagawa or the Naoki Prize, and none of his works had previously appeared in English translation. He is less well known than other writers (Yasuoka Shotaro, Kojima Nobuo, and Shono Junzo) with whom he has associated and whose works have been liberally translated into English. Yet, there are those who consider him to be one of the best contemporary writers in Japan. This volume by no means exhausts the scope of Shimao's fiction. There are no stories here, for instance, about childhood or student life, and none of his many travel stories. Some of his most famous stories-- "When we Never Left Port," for example--have not been included. But the stories presented here do offer a considerable variety of style, from the pristine storybook language of "The Farthest Edge of the Islands," to the young intellectual's jargon of "Everyday Life in a Dream," to the visionary, hysterical, occasionally ritualistic prose of the "sick wife" stories, to the sober, difficult, almost ponderous narration of "This Time That Summer." Shimao's approach to his material varies as well. "Everyday Life in a Dream" is the only representative here of a large number of stories usually called surrealistic by the critics, stories whose plots progress by the logic of dreams. The individual experience of real life are lived through a combination of conscious and unconscious perception. These stories are the least approachable and the least charming to the casual reader, but they serve, among other things, to highlight patterns in the more realistic fiction. "The Farthest Edge of the Islands" is a symbolic heightening of reality in another way, a romantic fairy tale beginning at the extremity of experience, at the farthest edge of the world. The other stories are presented as precise, close chronicles of reality by a participant in that reality whose attention never waivers and who never allows himself to avert his eyes from a world that he sees as his responsibility and in a sense his fault. All but the first story, "The Farthest Edge of the Islands," which is in third-person narration, are told in the first person by the character who plays Shimao's role in the life that inspired the fiction.

One glorious summer's afternoon, Karen Slocombe is visited by her cousin Penn, who unexpectedly asks for husband Drew's help in tracking down a missing relative, Justine. But why has Penn come to him, and why is she reluctant to get the police involved? Justine's mother, Roma Millan, an avid beekeeper, is not interested in the whereabouts of her daughter, but husband Laurie senses a troubled history between mother and daughter. Detective Den Cooper joins Drew as the case takes a sinister turn when it is discovered that a small child is also missing. But can the tangle of secrets and lies be unravelled before somebody gets hurt?

Drinking. Singing. Hugging. Kissing: All of these activities bring us immense pleasure. Yet, as these feelings fade, the thought of our inevitable death plagues us all. Follow the author as he shares personal accounts of surviving near death experiences and how he transformed his pain into a renewed sense of faith as he searches for a remedy to alleviate the looming sting of death that awaits us all.