Ricardo Somocurcio is in love with a bad girl.

He loves her as the teenage “Lily” in Lima in 1950, when she arrives suddenly one summer, only to disappear just as quickly. He loves her again as the enchanting “Comrade Arlette” in Paris, and loves her still when she reappears as a kept woman named Kuriko in Japan. As the years pass, whatever guise the bad girl assumes, and however she abuses him, Ricardo is doomed to worship her. But will he ever learn who she really is? The answer is as unclear as what has become of Ricardo himself—a lifelong expatriate, shadowed by the sense that he is only ever drifting, haunted by the protean Lily, inspired liar and irresistible muse of his youth.