Kamikaze

Japan, at the end of the nineteenth century. A world is breaking apart to make room for another.

The Tokugawa order has fallen. Peasants who were once forbidden a surname now insist on being called by it; the heirs of samurai brew sake and lease the right to collect taxes; railways, coal mines and factories cut across the old landscape, while hunger still rules the villages.

Santōka Taneda is eleven when he begins to slip out at night into the garden of his family's house, fleeing a drunken father and a mother sinking into despair. In the secret life of insects and night birds, and soon in the haiku of Shiki, Bashō and Buson, he finds a refuge that will one day save his life twice.

Around him other lives cross and collide: Kobayashi Issa, a peasant boy whose village is crushed by the army and who learns to read in a reformatory; his sister Konue, who runs away with Kōtoku Shūsui, an anarchist escaped from a convict mine; Tenetsu Moritake, the police chief who gives up everything to hunt him down; and Prince Saionji, the aesthete statesman who serves the new state from the shadows while reading the poems of a wandering poet.

Moving between history and invention, from Tokyo to the Manchurian steppe, from the docks of Satsuma to the streets of Paris, Kamikaze is a novel about the divine wind that sweeps an era away, and about the fragile things that survive it: a garden, a poem, a friendship.

Translated from the Spanish.