The Passion of the Sword-Knight
A white-haired swordsman swims out of a police cordon in the Sumida with a scroll held clear of the water, and a young hatamoto's son who happens to be walking the embankment sees what is written on it. Out of that accident Kunieda Shirō builds a hunt — for two scrolls said to name the hiding place of the treasure of the Kirishitan martyrs, and for the two girls whose birth is bound up with them.
Around it he assembles a cast only a newspaper serial could hold together: Omachi of Israel, who travels disguised as a mendicant flute-priest; Chūzō the Quick-Draw, a road thief with a rope trick and a sword school he invented and named after himself; Amakusa Tokiyuki, who preaches destruction as a philosophy; the conspirators of the Keian plot, masked as tengu; a vampire in a Nanban room in Edo; and, in a valley under Norikuradake, a settlement of woodturners who have decided to stop fighting and make bowls instead.
Kunieda wrote it in 1926 for a daily paper, at speed, and the speed is the point: a hundred and forty-five short chapters, shameless reversals, and a title that means both an ordeal and the Passion of Christ — which, in a novel whose hidden centre is Hara Castle and the Shimabara martyrs, is not decoration. The novel is complete; the author closes it himself, on a question he declines to answer. New English translation, with the author's inconsistencies kept and noted rather than corrected.
