The Demon of Yatsugatake

A girl of fourteen reads a forbidden romance aloud to her elder sister, and will not stop reading. Out of that small disobedience Kunieda Shirō builds a war between two peoples of the mountains — the Kajin, who live in the caves of Yatsugatake, and the Suiko clan of the water — and sends it down out of the peaks into the castle town of Takatō and on into the streets of Edo.

Between them move the swordsman Kagami Hanosuke, whom the world calls the Noonday Lamp; the crone Hisada, chieftain and sorceress; a Black Priest and a White Priest at the head of a living cult; a tengu named Sōsuke; and an affliction called the human-faced boil that no one can explain. Kunieda wrote it in 1924 for the magazines, at speed, and the speed is the point: the scenes are short, the reversals are shameless, and the supernatural is never explained away.

Unlike Kunieda's celebrated Shinshū Kōketsu-jō, which he abandoned, this novel is finished — the source ends with the author's own mark for The End. New English translation, complete, with the author's inconsistencies kept and noted rather than corrected.