Abstract

The story is set in Japan in the 1630s, several decades after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo, present-day Tokyo. The emperor and his court in the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto have been rendered powerless. The shogun and his vassals now control virtually the entire country. But there is one remote community where the spirit of freedom lives on: the Town of the Blue Princess.

After a quarrel with a samurai, the young man Toh fled his village and wandered into a mysterious land. It was the domain of Ao-hime, a place sustained by free exchange, under no one’s rule.
At its head stood the Princess, a capricious young woman. Even matters of life and death were decided by lottery, for such was considered the will of Heaven. Yet Man-hime herself was willful, sharp-tongued, and obstinate.
Though Toh escaped death, he was ordered to cultivate rice, beginning with the clearing of the fields. To survive, he honed the craft of farming and gradually grew close to the people of the land. But within the domain lay a secret well.
And one day, a young samurai appeared—

Author’s Information

Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1959. Graduated from Konan Women's University, Faculty of Literature. In 2008, she won the Encouragement Award at the Shosetsu Gendai Newcomer Awards for Novels, making her debut with "Even Fruits, Even Flowers." (The winning work was published in paperback and renamed "Flower Competition: The Story of the Prosperity of Mukojima Nazunaya.") In 2014, she won the Naoki Prize for "Love Song." In the same year, she won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize for "Holland Saikaku," in 2015 the Osaka Honma Book Award for "Sukatan," in 2016 the Nakayama Yoshihide Literary Prize for "Madame," in 2017 the Funahashi Seiichi Literary Prize for "Lucky Bag," in 2018 the Chuokoron Literary Prize for "Under Clouds, Under Clouds," in 2019 the Shiba Ryotaro Prize and Osaka Culture Prize for "Akutamaden" in the same year, and in 2020 the Shinran Prize for "Goodbye." In 2021, she won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Art Encouragement Prize and the Shibata Renzaburo Prize for "Rui." His other works include "The Teacher's Gardener," "The Matsutake Incident," "Sunset," "White Light," "Botanica," and "Morning Star, Night Star."