The Great Manhunt of the Immortal's Jar

In the last summer of Keiō a women's acrobatic troupe pitches its booth in the castle town of Suwa, and Itarō of the Itamiya, the sake wholesalers, goes back five days running to watch a girl named Shikin walk the tightrope. Gendayū, the troupe's jealous clown-master's man, answers by whistling a four-foot weasel over the wall of the Itamiya villa at night. Itarō's mother sees the animal, says the word "ghost," and faints — because sixteen years earlier the same whistling and the same weasel took her two-year-old daughter Osome out of the same garden and she was never found.

What follows is a chase through two cities and one lie. Suwa burns in a night of fire and fighting; Shikin swims her half-drowned sweetheart ashore on the back of a circus horse and is adopted into the house she was stolen from, renamed Okin, and finds the honorific chopsticks and the maid at her heels more of a cage than the booth ever was. In Edo she is recognized by Ton-kō, the three-shaku clown with the Fukusuke head, and hunted by Bun of the Kamanashi, who wants her back — and, more than her, wants a small unglazed jar, three sun tall, that an old thief called Old Gramps dug into a sandbank of the Kamanashi River and never came back for.

The jar makes music in the dead of night. Kunieda gives it a pedigree — Sung dynasty, an immortal who narrowed to smoke and went in through the lid, a curse that put Takeda Katsuyori on Tenmokuzan, and afterwards a run of good fortune for Tsunayoshi and Yanagisawa that ended with an assassination and a fall from office — and then puts it in a curio dealer's stock, where it comes into the hands of Katsu Kaishū. The manhunt of the title is Kaishū's: Iba Hachirō and his pupils at the door of the Hairy-Shins House, waiting in the street because Kobori Yoshiya, an amateur shamisen master with a drawn sword at his back, is singing Yamauba to the end, and the rōnin who mean to burn Chiyoda Castle are listening too. The map that came with the jar is burned last, and holds Old Gramps' testament in heat-raised letters.

First English translation, complete and unabridged, in twenty-nine chapters, with the period terms of measure and stagecraft kept and footnoted rather than converted away.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

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