The Edo Scroll

EDO NOIR FROM THE TOKUGAWA ERA

A junk dealer works his way through the back streets of Surugadai in midwinter, calling out for old rags and broken crockery. He is not a junk dealer. He is Mankichi, the Tenma detective from Osaka, and he has traced a missing woman to a shuttered house with a changed nameplate and bars on the windows. What he finds inside is worse than he imagined — and the people who put her there are already coming back.

The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

There are more threads in motion here than in any single volume of The Three Musketeers, and every one is pulled tight and tied off by the final page, when the heroes slip out of Edo under cover of darkness with the villains hot on their trail.

The Edo Scroll is the second book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji's Naruto Hichō, the 1926 serial series that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history. Translated in literary prose that reads as though it were originally composed in English, it brings the novel that created the modern Japanese adventure genre to the English-speaking world for the first time.