Oumi Shigemori, also known as Hanjo, is from a long line of merchants. He knows the tricks of the trade when it comes to business and making profits. But Hanjo understands that profits have to be long term and taking short cuts in business decisions eventually leads to a collapse. Making sure the buyer, the seller, and the community all benefit from the transaction is Hanjo’s philosophy. He travels around the country, helping both small and big businesses turn their finances from a molehill to a mountain.

If people who turn into animals really existed in the modern world, how would they behave? This book gives some realistic, yet unexpected, answers. Nobody is a complete good guy or bad guy--every character is a complex figure, and even the bad guys have some very good reasons for what they do. Leo is an innocent caught in the midst of it all, but nothing like the "helpless killer" stereotype of American werewolf movies--he is a person in control of his own powers, trying to decide what to do with his life now that so much has changed.