The Mysterious Insect Hall

An actress teases a young swordsman with a question he cannot answer — does he have the nerve to kill a man? — and the question carries Isshiki Koichirō out of Edo, down the Tōkaidō and into the orbit of a strange building on the coast, where a scholar breeds insects and has learned to make a butterfly that will not die.

Around that butterfly Kunieda Shirō sets everything he had: two great houses of the shogun's collateral line, hunting each other for the secret; two rival sorceresses with a laboratory apiece and an unnamed corrosive fluid; a band of thieves who call themselves after the Seven Gods of Fortune and fight in a revolving wheel of linked hands; a sisterhood of mountain nuns nobody can account for; a one-legged assistant who duels with his crutch; and the Master of the Insect Hall himself, lecturing on the society of insects in a room furnished in the Dutch style.

Written in 1929 for the magazines, at speed, and the speed is the point: fifty-five short sections, shameless reversals, and a scientific romance that never once apologises for itself. New English translation, complete, with the author's inconsistencies kept and noted rather than corrected.