The Ivy Bridge of Kiso

A masked swordsman on the Kiso road, a rich man's daughter named Niodori, and a flogging in a courtesans' quarter — and out of that opening Kunieda Shirō's longest novel runs for two hundred chapters and never once slows down.

It is a book that keeps turning into other books. It begins as a tale of the post-stations of Kiso and becomes a manual of ninjutsu, with Momochi Santayū's school and the boy who will grow into Kirigakure Saizō. It becomes a Kirishitan novel, with a Jesuit father casting cannon in a mountain fortress and a cross of gold that nobody can explain. It becomes a war novel, with sieges, night assaults and break-outs around Ganseki Castle, and a debate on liberty and equality held in a castle hall in the sixteenth century. And in its last third it drops through the rock altogether into a country underground where the Reijin and the beast-men live under gods out of the Kojiki — Ōmononushi, Tsuchihiko, Aratama no Takeru — among magatama that bend the will and caverns that have never seen the sun.

Kunieda wrote it for Kōdan Zasshi from 1922 to 1926 and then stopped. The afterword printed here says why: five years of writing, his strength gone, and not a third of what he had planned put down. The novel closes with 「（前編終り）」— "End of Part One" — and there was never a Part Two. He gives it a full novelistic ending anyway, and the copy-text then prints the different ending used when the magazine serialization stopped; both are here, in the order the source gives them.

First English translation, complete and unabridged — all 199 chapters, with the author's own contradictions kept and footnoted rather than tidied away.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 694-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.