Mardock Scramble

Why me? It was to be the last thought a young prostitute, Balot, would ever have...as a human anyway. Taken in by a devious gambler named Shell, she became a slave to his cruel desires and would have been killed by his hand if not for a private investigator and his self-aware Universal Tool, Oefcoque. Now a cyborg, Balot has not only physical powers, but the ability to disrupt social environments. She chases after Shell, his partner-in-crime Boiled, and faces down a variety of insane villains in this pulse-pounding cyberpunk noir adventure.

Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1977, Tow Ubukata was exposed to a blending of cultures from early childhood until the age of fourteen, having lived in Singapore and Nepal because of his father's work. In 1996, while in college, Ubukata won the first Sneaker Taisho Gold Prize for his light novel Kuroi Kisetsu (Black Season) and thus debuted as a writer. In 2003, he won the Nihon SF Taisho Award for Mardock Scramble, originally published as a three-volume series. He is involved in a wide range of projects including anime production for Fafner, video game production, and original content writing for comics such as Le Chevalier D'Eon. His other works include the Bye-Bye Earth and Spiegel novel series. In 2009, he published his first historical novel, Tenchi Meisatsu, focusing on a mathematician of the Edo period.