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The book details the story of Tuck, a pilot for a cosmetics company who, while making love to a sluttish pickup in his plane, crashes. Tuck's backstory is a hilarious sendup of Hamlet.
To avoid scandal he is consequently banished by the president of the company and blacklisted from piloting. However, he receives a lucrative offer from a scientist on a remote Micronesian island to transport cargo to and from Japan. He agrees, and moves to the island, where he discovers a horrible secret.
The scientist's wife has been dressing up like a Goddess and using the guise of a sacred ritual to kidnap island natives who are members of a cargo cult, remove their non-vital organs, and sell them on the black market for the Yakuza. (The natives consider the members of their tribe with an abdominal scar to have been "blessed.") Somehow along the way a Phillipino transvettite navigator and a talking fruit-bat get mixed up in the equation, and eventually a moral conflict ensues. The book was a best seller.