A Picture-Scroll of Kyōhō Street Gossip

Edo in the Kyōhō years. The shogun is a reformer, the magistrate Ōoka Echizen is fair and shrewd, and the city below them is a scroll of rumors: a sword school with a secret, a pawn shop at New Year, a maid nobody can place, a judgment that must be written before anyone lies down. Told in the quick, many-voiced style of a storyteller who knows every street.

Hayashi Fubo's long historical novel in a new complete English translation by Valentin Sarić, with endnotes on the Edo background.