"The 'town' is Yokohama. John Sky is a Vietnam War veteran who takes up residence there during the early 1970s. Finding work playing piano in a small jazz club, he immerses himself in the seductive lifestyle of the water business, a modern version of the floating world--a traditional metaphor for life's transient nature. This is an after-hours world inhabited by the people who work in Japan's bars and nightspots. While wandering the streets of this intriguing and sometimes dangerous landscape, Sky meets two women who will change his life forever: Sayoko, a young cabaret hostess whose ethereal beauty and mercurial mood shifts mask a tragic secret, and Miyako, an aging water business woman who says as much with silence as with words."
