Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Penguin (June 28, 2005)
ISBN: 0143035320
From the Author of RASHAMON GATE and THE HELL SCREEN, as well as a dozen Akitada short stories in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, comes this first English language edition of THE DRAGON SCROLL.
ALSO COMING IN 2005 - "The Tanabata Magpie" - A murder-suicide during the Tanabata festival draws Akitada into a love story that is even stranger than that of the celestial lovers in the Tanabata legend. In an upcoming issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.The Dragon Scroll is the first novel in the Akitada series. Akitada is twenty-five years old, an impoverished nobleman and earnest government official on his first major assignment. His whole future career rides on this performance.
He has been sent to Kazusa province in Eastern Japan to discover the whereabouts of missing taxes before the provincial governor can leave his office and return to court. Eager and naïve about political intrigues, Akitada blunders instantly into a dangerous conspiracy when the suspicious death of the previous governor attracts his attention. This signals a sequence of shocking and bloody violence in the provincial capital. As two beautiful women play on his sympathies, Akitada is distracted from a duty which becomes less and less palatable. In the end, both his official and his private persona are tested.
Among the characters, new readers will meet two regulars, the elderly family servant, Seimei, and the impudent womanizer Tora. The meeting between Akitada and Tora in this novel begins the strong bond between master and servant that characterizes the later novels.
The other characters represent a cross section of Japanese society in the eleventh century; they include noblemen-scholars, Buddhist clerics, minor officials in the provincial administration, soldiers, artisans, wrestlers, peddlers, prostitutes, gangs, and one very unusual young woman who matches her fighting skills against any man.
From the exciting beginning of his journey to the nightmarish climax at the end, Akitada’s adventure in Kazusa is a fast-paced and riveting account of a young man’s passage to maturity.
Careful: This one sizzles! (I. J. Parker)
For anyone who enjoys the Sano Ichiro series of mysteries by Laura Joh Rowland, the Akitada series of Irene Parker will be a welcome addition to the desolate shelves of historical fiction set in Japan's past.
Since I mentioned Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series, the next book will be THE ASSASSIN'S TOUCH: A NOVEL (Hardcover: 336 pages). It is scheduled to be released August 1, 2005 by St. Martin's Minotaur.
Enjoy...