Rei Shimura, a California female surviving in Tokyo, has an antiques business that’s only slightly more lucrative than her love lifestyle. When her aunt enrolls her in the Kayama School of Ikebana to learn how exactly to arrange plants, disaster strikes. A mean teacher is available with scissors in her neck, and Takeo Kayama, the sexy billionaire heir to the school, considers Rei’s aunt the primary suspect.

Rei strives to prove her aunt’s innocence but becomes enmeshed in a web of upper-class females, edgy environmental protesters, and young immigrants trying to make it in another of the world’s most interesting and expensive cities. As danger increases, clues are sent to Rei in haiku poems that hint her family members played a job in an aged Kayama School tragedy that threatens not only her romantic future with Takeo-but her very own life.