The Sound in the Keep

On stormy nights with neither moon nor star, a moaning comes off the keep of Nagoya Castle — the keep with the golden shachihoko on its ridge, built by Katō Kiyomasa at his own expense, whose dimensions and whose seventeen thousand nine hundred ryō of gold Kunieda sets out to the last sun before he lets anything else happen. The watch whisper that the fish are weeping, and that the government of the domain has grown slack.

The lord of the domain is Tokugawa Muneharu of Owari, who was passed over for the shogunate in favour of Yoshimune and has spent his temper ever since on tiger-skin hoods, white oxen in scarlet harness and Bon dances at two ryō a turn. In the first month of Genbun he takes a kabuki dancer called Hantayū into the inner apartments and renames her Lady Ohan. In the spring he goes out in a plain robe to view the cherries at the Tōshōgū, and there he watches a fairground showman sell papier-mâché model mansions — models with working moats, signal-flare stone lanterns, bamboo groves cut for spears — and hears him boast that the great castle-builders of the past were not worth a fart to a river-otter.

The showman is brought into the castle on his own terms: his clothes, his manner of speech, cross-legged, and no go-between. He goes on to fool Muneharu with a seeing-through light that reads the treason in a man's heart, to walk out of the keep by a loophole, and to visit a nanban hothouse under a Nagoya garden where an old man grows three hundred kinds of poison plant and sells a sleeping draught that produces music and a country made of heaven and the dragon palace at once. The moaning has an explanation, and so does the opium in the castle, and so does Lady Ohan's habit of standing very close behind Muneharu's back — and every one of the four principals turns out to be someone other than the man he is playing.

First English translation, complete and unabridged, with endnotes on the castle measurements, the Owari succession and the thieves' book the author cites at the close.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 99-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.