The Whirl of Life and Death

After midnight in a Koishikawa street in the summer of 1730, a woman stops a young samurai and offers to sell him his fortune. He buys the cheapest one she has — go up into the mountains, and you will find something — and before the night is out he has overheard a prince of the blood discussing a stolen jewel out of an Arabian desert shrine, been ambushed twice by a stranger who bought a fortune from the same woman, and acquired the enemy who will shadow him for the length of the book.

Miyagawa Chinoo is a scholar of Dutch learning with no family, no post and a very good sword. Daigo Genshirō is his mirror: the same age, the same skill, the same fortune bought from the same miko, and the same two objects of desire. What they are both hunting leads out of Edo and up into the mountains of Hida, to a plateau called Nyūkawadaira where a settlement has kept the Mohammedan faith for a hundred years behind a wall of forest, and where a shrine holds an idol with one shining eye — and to Namie, who is worth more to Chinoo than the jewel.

Kunieda Shirō wrote it for the magazine Yūben across eleven monthly instalments, and the serial tempo is the whole pleasure of it: twenty-eight short chapters, a reversal or a corpse in most of them, torch-lit night marches, a horseman ambush in a burning village, a false idol, and two men circling each other until the border between life and death is something they cross back and forth at will — which is what the title says. The novel is finished; the author closes it himself, in his own voice, and then adds a page to tell you what the fortune had meant.

First English translation, complete and unabridged, with the author's own errors about Mecca and his own contradictions kept and footnoted rather than tidied away.

English-language digital edition. Translated by Valentin Sarić.

You receive: a 176-page PDF and an EPUB edition.

Digital download only. No physical book is shipped.