The Blood-Dyed Castle of the Divine Realm

Kai province in the years of Takeda Shingen. On a hazy spring night the young retainer Tsuchiya Shōzaburō wanders out of the castle town — and into a story that never lets him back. On an island in Lake Motosu, under Mount Fuji, stands Kōketsu Castle, where a masked Castle Lord trades in a crimson cloth dyed with human blood; on the mountain's Third Station the Fuji Order gathers the afflicted around a prophet; and between the two move a vampire, a nameless Potter, the retainer Kōsaka Jintarō and the girl Tsukiko.

Kunieda Shirō's serial of 1925–26 is the strangest book in Taishō popular fiction: a samurai gothic that argues with itself about sin, sickness and beauty, written in the language and with the attitudes of its time. It breaks off, famously, in mid-gesture — the author never returned to it. This is a complete English translation of the twenty-one chapters Kunieda wrote, ending exactly where he stopped. The author's inconsistencies are kept and noted, not corrected.