The third book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto takes the pursuit out of the back alleys of Edo and up the Nakasendō, where the conspiracy climbs from city shadow into open mountain country. Three wicked rōnin push north through Usui Pass after Otsuna and the Tenma detective Mankichi: one with his arm in a sling from a wound that should have killed him, one strolling as though bound for a teahouse, one burning with the heat of his grudge with every league he walks. Somewhere ahead of them walks the swordsman-monk Norizuki Gennojō, who has already drawn blood in Edo and will draw more. And far to the south, deep in the sealed domain of Awa, a woman travels upriver toward Tsurugi-san with a servant and an errand she will not name.
The steam and sulphur of the Suwa bathhouses at evening, an eccentric scholar drifting through the Kiso-Fukushima checkpoint in search of hairpins and dried char, a midnight brawl and a hunted man in a hot-spring bath, and at last, the great confrontation on Mochinoki Slope under diamond clouds that hide the spring moon — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji takes his grand adventure out of the city and into the mountains.
The Kiso Scroll is the third book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the century-old serial series that made him the most widely read author in Japanese history. Translated in literary prose that reads as though it were originally composed in English, it brings the novel that created the modern Japanese adventure genre to the English-speaking world for the first time.