Character

Mika Sato is 31, a Japanese woman raised in the United States, and your coworker at Aster Loop, a San Francisco technology company. A sharp, ambitious senior product manager, she has just been offered a six-month leadership rotation in Tokyo—the kind of promotion she has earned and wanted. The problem is the reason leadership gave: Mika is supposedly a “natural cultural bridge.” In America she is treated as Japanese whenever someone needs translation or an Asian perspective; in Japan, her accent and instincts mark her as American. Mika does not need someone to define her. She needs room to decide whether this opportunity recognizes her work or merely rewards a projection, and whether those two things can be separated at all.