Glynne Walley Boeken

Stunning Japanese novel with a chilling twist - the follow-up to Ring and Spiral. Kaoru's father, Hideyuki, lies dying in a Tokyo hospital, his body ravaged by viral cancer. This nightmarish incurable disease has sprung out of nowhere and has begun to affect organisms all over the planet. Twenty years ago Hideyki worked on a virtual reality project which replicated evolution on earth, called the Loop. The project failed when the organisms within it inexplicably stopped reproducing normally and started cloning. Nearly all of the other scientists who worked on the Loop are already dead - from cancer. To get to the heart of the mystery, Kaoru must travel to the other side of the planet, to the Mojave desert. The secret he encounters there will overturn everything he thought he knew about the world - and his own identity. In this suspense-filled follow-up to 'Ring' and 'Spiral', Suzuki masterfully confounds the reader with a stunning new twist on the Ring mythology.

"A translation of the first fourteen chapters of the Japanese novel Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (1814-1842) by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848)"--

Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi Hakkenden is one of the monuments of Japanese literature. This multigenerational samurai saga was one of the most popular and influential books of the nineteenth century and has been adapted many times into film, television, fiction, and comics. His Master's Blade, the second part of Hakkenden , begins the story of the eight Dog Warriors created from the mystic union between Princess Fuse and the dog Yatsufusa and born into eight different samurai families in fifteenth-century Japan. The first is Inuzuka Shino, orphaned descendent of proud warriors. Left with nothing save a magical sword and the bead that marks him as a Dog Warrior, young Shino escapes his evil aunt and uncle and sets out to restore his family name. Unaware of their karmic bond, Shino and the other Dog Warriors are drawn into a world of vendettas and quests, gallants, and rogues, as each strives to learn his true nature and find his place in the eight-man fraternity.