Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Lousy story wrapped in a furoshiki

There are some nice Japanese culture tidbits in this book but overall there's not much going on here....Weak, cardboard like secondary characters, wildly erratic behavior by main character. The plot bounces around too much and since you don't have too much attachment to the characters, you really don't care where they end up. Character dialogue is weak at times and jerky...I frequently felt like I had missed a sentence or two but it was just poor dialogue. It's been a long time since I've read a book that I thought it better to throw out than to possible burden another human being with a story of such lacking. You'd be better off to read some real Japanese mysteries by Miyuki Miyabe or Akimitsu Takagi than this Gaijin-lite stuff. ...