From his deathbed, 81-year-old Jack O'Brien reveals to his grandson the existence of a long-forgotten story he wrote as a teenager years earlier while living in Japan. The 16-year-old grandson finds the story in an old footlocker in his grandfather's attic, and spends days pouring over the real-life account. Set at a U.S. military base in rural Japan in 1948, and playing out against a backdrop of swirling post-War social change, Jack's Voices of the Locusts tells the story of three families-one black, one white, one Asian. The story also recounts Jack's love for a Japanese girl, Fujiko Kobaysi, who has been promised in marriage by her parents to an older man. Told in vivid and sometimes haunting detail, Jack and Fujiko are frustrated in their romantic quest by story characters coming to terms (often violently) with the emotional scars of World War II.