Ryuujin Hashimoto's seventh birthday should be a joyful occasion. Instead, his parents are murdered by five men who break into their modest home in Tacoma, WA, as the young boy hides under the kitchen table. The boy finds a new home in Tokyo with his uncle, Jiro Asano, an influential aikido master and director of the Cabinet Research Chamber (postwar Japan's CIA). Asano recognizes the potential of a skillful assassin in his nephew and trains him expressly for that purpose, encouraging him to eschew all emotional attachments that might distract him. Dressed in the bloodstained rags he has sewn together from his parents' clothes, Ryuujin transforms himself into the fearsome killer the news media dubs Raggedy Man. His service to Asano brings him into conflict with foes across the globe, including the American Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza. But he remains obsessed with the two-decade mystery of who killed his parents and why. Closing on the truth, he finds the man who holds the shocking answers to that day, and he exacts terrible revenge.