The Blood-Smeared Dagger

Kyoto, the last years of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Taikō has raised his nephew Hidetsugu to Imperial Regent and given him the Jurakudai palace — and is now preparing to destroy him. Kunieda tells the fall through the people caught inside it: Kitabatake Akiyasu, a provincial gentleman in a capital that despises him; the woman Hagino; the lady-official Kōzōsu, Hideyoshi's confidante, the "dagger in his breast"; and the thief Ishikawa Goemon passing through.

Twenty short chapters, two of them couplets from Bai Juyi; a drugged chamber that Kunieda censored himself in 1928 and that this translation leaves masked, as printed; historical figures who are real and whose titles are kept exact. A compact, bloody court intrigue from the master of Taishō period fiction. New English translation, with notes.