High-flying lawyer Mitsuyo Ohira doesn't have the kind of past you'd expect. After falling victim to bullying at junior high school, she attempted suicide by disembowelment, dropped out of school and hung out with drug-using delinquents. All that before, at age 16, becoming the wife of a gang boss.
The imprint of those desperate years remains on the body of this slightly-built, 37-year-old woman: tattoos on her back of the bodhisattva Kannon and a snake give her so much pain that she carries analgesics wherever she goes.
All that began to change, however, when as a 22-year-old hostess at an Osaka nightclub, she met Hirosaburo Ohira, a friend of her father she used to call Otchan (Uncle), and whose admonition and encouragement helped the then-divorcee to turn her life around.