Hanzo the Razor

Against the backdrop of the Edo treasury devaluing currency and driving many into poverty, Hanzo Itami enforces the law without regard to status. He shows inadequate respect to the treasurer, who wants him dead. He finds a young woman dead following an abortion, and he enters a temple without permission looking for evidence. He tortures and then sexually assaults the temple's priestess to get information. He's then assigned to protect the mint from a notorious thief. There he closets himself in the bedroom of the mint's mistress. He waits. The thief arrives - but other crimes are afoot. Devalued currency, white slavery, and government corruption lead Hanzo to one conclusion.

Hanzo is an incorruptible and unorthodox officer in Edo, as famous for his self-discipline and his love shaft as his sword. Against the backdrop of his magistrate's occasional rounding up of vagrants, Hanzo learns that an infamous killer is no longer on his island prison: did he escape or was he never there? Hanzo's investigation leads him to the magistrate's mistress, the killer's former lover. Hanzo pursues political questions that suggest complicity at the highest levels. Using sexual assault, he interrogates the mistress and later the favorite of Edo's most powerful woman. Can he get to the bottom of what's going on before powerful forces get him fired or killed?

Follow the money. In a time of economic disaster for wage earners, Hanzo discovers a conspiracy among high officials to "borrow" gold from the shogunate's treasury and loan it out to the destitute, including impecunious samurai - exacting either interest payments or family heirlooms from the debtors. Along the way, Hanzo extracts a confession from a ghost using his assaulting methods, foils thieves, connects with Heisuke Takei a friend from his youth, offers protection to a forward-thinking physician Genan Sugino who has defamed his ruler, discovers a pleasure ring of young wives and a blind music teacher, and cuckolds a corrupt official under his very nose.