As they lay in bed, she got Atlanta to slot her a Japanese-language tape—mystery stories of Edogawa Rampo. David fell asleep at once, lulled by the meaningless polysyllables. Laura listened as she drifted off, letting the alien grammar soak in to those odd itchy places where the brain stored language. She like Rampo’s straight journalistic Japanese, none of those involved circumlocutions and maddening veiled allusions....