Bleah. I waited an hour or so for THAT ending?
It seems that the longer the stories are the less-important the fantasy portion is; the tattoo in the last Giant, the ghosts in the Japanese giant, etc... Not always, but often. This story was the same. The fantasy part seemed grafted on as an excuse for these two people to go on the run from an "evil" senator who also held power over his misguided younger brother. I would've been thrilled had the story ended about 20 minutes earlier, probably with a showdown in Japan and something more fantastical. Instead... bleah, as I said.
The reading was extremely quiet... I had my iPod up to 95% and my car up to 40 and it was still hard to hear some of it while other times the audio popped and made my rearview mirror (and teeth) vibrate. Good reading, generally, though it seemed like the reader wanted to stop doing the accent after a while. It started to feel forced.
There was just too MUCH in this story, I think. Make it about civil rights and a family on the run, or make it about a magical piece of glass -- which we still don't know the provenance of, which I would really have liked to know, which I think would've enhanced the story -- or make it about two people living in Japan and the kid finds the bones... but all together, I felt buried, and the slow reading didn't help. Perhaps two or three good stories, but only passable as a single one.