Plot summary

Tea From an Empty Cup is at its core a tightly plotted detective novel.

The story revolves around near mythical Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, which has been destroyed in a vaguely described natural cataclysm several decades before the story opens. The generation that remembers "Old Japan" appears to have passed on. A virtual version of Japan has become a sort of holy grail

Holy Grail

The Holy Grail is a sacred object figuring in literature and certain Christian traditions, most often identified with the dish, plate, or cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper and said to possess miraculous powers...

 for a core group of artificial reality

Artificial reality

Artificial reality was the term Myron W. Krueger used to describe his interactive immersive environments, based on video recognition techniques, that put a user in full, unencumbered contact with the digital world. He started this work in the late 1960s and is considered to be a key figure in the...

addicts. Artificial Reality, or AR, like "post-apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty" has become immensely popular in an increasingly dreary overcrowded world, not just as a game, but as a way of life. Written in 1998, the world described bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the amount of time spent online by generations who have grown up with the Internet as part of the fabric of their existence.

AR is not just a way of life, it turns out, but also of death, as homicide detective Dore Konstantin discovers when she is called upon to investigate the death of a young man in an artificial reality parlour (think video arcade with a full wired body suit) and discovers he died the same way in the game as in reality. She therefore decides to investigate this young man's life within the artificial realities he frequented, even though the legal precedents already established mean that nothing she discovers is admissible as evidence because "Everything is a Lie" in AR. In the process she stumbles onto something far more complicated then a mere murder case.

In Tea from an Empty Cups interwoven storyline, Yuki, a young ethnically Japanese woman is desperately looking for her boyfriend Tom, whom she fears has taken up with a mysterious and notorious woman named Joy Flower, becoming one of "Joy's Boyz", about whom a lot of nasty rumours circulate.

When Yuki seeks Joy Flower out, she immediatedly is taken into Joy's inner circle, becoming her personal assistant, which leads her, like Konstantin, into a voyage of discovery towards the central mystery of the book.