A group of Japanese tourists are paying a visit to Haworth. The party consists almost entirely of middle-aged women, except for a solitary, rather serious-looking young woman in her mid-twenties. They visit the parsonage, walk up and down the cobbled high street and stride out onto the moors to admire the view. But when the coach is about to depart the young woman - Kazuko - contrives to be left behind. She checks into a B+B and, in her room, spreads a handful of photographs out on top of the bedspread. Then, over the following couple of days, we accompany her as she wanders around the surrounding countryside, attempting to identify the locations in the photographs, but failing to find the old ruin at Top Withins - a site said to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. Throughout the book she chats on her mobile to her sister who lives in London (Kazuko herself is just visiting the UK). On a trip to Keighley Museum she meets Ali, a young British-Asian man, who gives her a lift back to Haworth after she misses the last train.

Ali becomes her unofficial assistant and develops something of a crush on her, and through these conversations we gradually discover that Kazuko is retracing the footsteps of her mother, who visited the village some years earlier, prior to committing suicide. It transpires that Kazuko is convinced that her mother had an affair whilst on her trip to England - or that something significant happened to her around that time. And that if she could only pinpoint that particular event she might finally be able to understand what drove her to take her own life. Towards the end of the book Kazuko has an argument with her sister, calls up Ali and, in a drunken fit, vents some of the anger and resentment she feels towards her mother for abandoning her. But with the help of the woman at the B+B she manages to reconcile herself to her loss, and in the middle of the night she creeps out onto the moors, finally finds the old ruin, and buries the photographs of her mother there. * I first started turning over this idea after reading an article which claimed that due to the number of Japanese visitors the area around Haworth was the only part of Britain to have signposts in both English and Japanese. I liked the notion of two such seemingly different cultures rubbing up against each other, as well as the North of England being seen through a foreigner's eyes. Incidentally, adding the suffix '-chan' to a girl's name (in this case, by Kazuko's sister) is a term of affection, which effectively means 'baby sister'.