1968年，天藤湘子出生在大阪。 天藤的父亲是日本黑社会成员与日本山口组关系密切，她本人年轻时也曾加入过黑帮并服用过毒品。细看她的纹身，那是精雕细刻的龙、凤和一个中世纪的日本艺伎，艺伎的嘴里含着一把尖刀。这纹身刻画的就是天藤儿时和年轻时生活的写照。

Yakuza Moon is the shocking, yet intensely moving memoir of 37-year-old Shoko Tendo, who grew up the daughter of a yakuza boss. Tendo lived her life in luxury until the age of six, when her father was sent to prison and her family fell into terrible debt. Bullied by classmates and terrorized

at home by a father who became a drunken, violent monster after his release from prison, Tendo rebelled. A regular visitor to nightclubs at the age of 12, she soon became a drug addict and a member of a girl gang. At 15 she was sentenced to eight months in a juvenile detention center.

Adulthood brought big bucks and glamour when Tendo started working as a bar hostess during Japan's booming bubble economy of the nineteen-eighties. But among her many rich and loyal patrons there were also abusive clients, one of whom beat her so badly that her face was left permanently scarred.

When her mother died, Tendo plunged into such a deep depression that she tried to commit suicide twice.

Tendo takes us through the bad times with warmth and candor, and gives a moving and inspiring account of how she overcame a lifetime of discrimination and hardship. Getting tattooed, from the base of her neck to the tips of her toes, with a design centered on a geisha with a dagger in her mouth, was

an act that empowered her to start making changes in her life. She quit her job as a hostess. On her last day at the bar she looked up at the full moon, a sight she never forgot. The moon became a symbol of her struggle to become whole, and the title of the book she wrote as an epitaph for herself

and her family.