Arts & Culture Apr. 15, 2011 - 05:44AM JST ( 8 )

TOKYO —

At once heart-rending and eye-opening, this true-life memoir is a shocking yet intensely moving first-person account of one woman’s experience of growing up in Japan’s yakuza society.

Born into the family of a wealthy crime boss, Shoko Tendo lives her early years in luxury. But labeled “the yakuza kid,” she soon becomes the victim of bullying and discrimination from teachers and classmates at school, and of her father’s drunken rages at home. As her family falls into debt and her father’s influence wanes, Tendo falls in with the wrong crowd, and other men begin to appear in her life. By the age of fifteen she is a gang member, by the age of eighteen a drug addict, and her 20s are marked by a series of abusive and violent relationships with men.

Tendo sinks lower and lower, time and again an unwitting victim as she struggles to define her role as a woman in the violent, sexist, and drug-addled world she is thrust into at a far-too-tender age. After the death of her parents and her own attempt at suicide, she begins a tortuous, soul-searching reevaluation of the road she has taken—and it is only a startling, unconventional act of empowerment that brings her back from the brink.