Blades of Chivalry

t a teahouse on Ryōgoku Hirokōji a Satsuma retainer offers a snake-handling showwoman fifty ryō to follow the man she loves up the Kiso road, and will not say why. The next dawn three travellers leave Edo for the Kōshū highroad: Yamakage Sōzaburō of the Mito house, a swordsman of the Enmei school sent to find a physician; Ijūin Gorō of the Ono-ha Ittō-ryū, in merchant's disguise; and Osen of the Braided Cord, dressed head to heel in indigo as a viper-catcher, whistling snakes into her creel as she goes.

What they are all looking for is the Herb Adept — a hermit doctor on Ontake who compounds medicines, keeps a white crow, travels behind a medicine cart pushed by his servant Ijūrō, and turns out to be Tokuhon of Kai. The search runs from the post-station of Fukushima and the Kiso valley, through the sanka camps and the lair of the six-mon women on Hotarugaoka, down to Nagoya, where Lord Owari Munaharu has been shut in an underground room built inside a hollow cedar and is being worked on by Omon of the Crow Band to make him sign a covenant of alliance with the house of Shimazu. Shimazu Tarōmaru wants the province; the Heron Band of Mito wants him stopped; and a Nagoya street boss, an astronomer who reads faces instead of stars, and an actress of the women's kabuki named Ogino Yaeume all take a hand.

It is a newspaper serial of 1926 and it behaves like one: a hundred and seventy-five short chapters, street battles, forged letters, sleeping draughts, a burning viper-sake shop, two women in love with the same man and one of them giving him up, a woman turning her own blade on herself. Against all of it Kunieda sets the Adept, who tells a daimyō longing to run off and go barefoot that a man purifies his heart by doing his own work and governing his province, and who at the end has eleven people join hands on a beach and then sends each of them down a separate road. The censor's marks from 1926 are still in the text, 44, 85, 178 and 298 characters cut out of the underground scenes, and they are printed here where they fall.

First English translation, complete and unabridged — all 175 chapters, with the author's own contradictions, anachronisms and misprints kept and footnoted rather than tidied away.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 529-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.