Gina in the Floating World: A Novel

A bank internship in Japan’s booming 1981 economy is supposed to be twenty-three-year-old Dorothy Falwell’s ticket into a prestigious international MBA program. But the internship is unpaid—so, to make ends meet, she accepts an evening job as a hostess in a rundown suburban bar, a far cry from the sensuous woodblock prints she’s seen of old Tokyo’s “floating world.”

Like her namesake, Dorothy hasn't planned on the detours she encounters in her own twisted version of Oz. Renamed Gina by her...