The Flight of the Great Roc
A moneylender of the Heian court, dying rich and thoroughly disgusted with his children, has a painter hide the whereabouts of his fortune in a rebus worked into a scroll of the Six Immortal Poets — and then has the scroll cut to pieces and scattered. Nine hundred years later, in the Bunsei era, an impoverished swordsman named Yabu Montarō begins collecting the pieces.
What follows is Kunieda Shirō at his fastest: a burgled physician's house, a tattooed woman thief, a beggar who calls himself the God of Poverty and turns out to be someone else entirely, the studio of the painter Tani Bunchō, a command performance before the retired shogun Ienari, and a monstrous bird seen wheeling in the sky over Edo that the whole city takes for an omen. The chase runs from Edo to Nagasaki, and the answer waiting at the end of it is not the one anybody in the book expects.
Written for the magazines in 1925 and finished — story, reversal and epilogue, with the author stepping forward at the close to lay down his pen in his own person. Kunieda interrupts himself constantly, drops Mitsui and Mitsubishi into a Heian scene, and puts Leonardo da Vinci in the thirteenth century; all of it is translated as printed and noted rather than corrected. New English translation, complete, with 137 notes and a full glossary of the Edo realia.
