The Nanban Secret

At a crossroads on Nijō Avenue in Nobunaga's Kyoto, a shrine maiden with a mirror at her breast preaches against the foreign priests — Xavier, Fróis, Organtino — and asks the crowd whether anyone can solve the riddle of the Nanban Temple. A young samurai follows her north past the Golden Pavilion into the Kitayama hills, and she stops him with a flash of that mirror and a warning: beyond this point lies the Maidens' Garden Realm, and he should go home tonight.

He is Mori Ukonmaru, twenty-one, cousin of Mori Ranmaru, carrying urgent orders from Azuchi Castle. Crossing Lake Biwa he takes an arrow in the bow of his boat with a letter wound round the shaft: others are watching the Nanban Temple too. In a shabby house beside the temple wall lives a jester called Benzaibō, who calls his eighteen-year-old daughter Miss Tamiya and is not a jester at all, and who has spent three years in the temple grounds with plans, a surveying instrument and a boring machine, and has finally got his answer. A balloon-seller boy of fourteen watches through a hole in the paper window and hears two sentences: take good care of this doll, and the key to the secret is the third wall.

Thirty-one chapters, and the doll goes from hand to hand through nearly all of them — stolen, its eyes pressed, made to speak, split open. Genjo, a woman who bosses twenty showmen, fights Tamiya with a dagger in the street and has men waiting under the bridge. Tamiya is hunted by slavers on Muromachi Street by an old man who walks bent over a stick he does not need. Ukonmaru is lost in a labyrinth and held prisoner, courteously, by the women of the Garden Realm and their mistress Karahime, who has solved half the riddle herself. The gold at the bottom of it is five hundred million yen said to have come over with Xavier, and the question the book actually asks is what it was for.