The secret history of the Lord of Musashi and Arrowroot

The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi takes the form of extracts from several invented medieval chronicles that burlesque the usual Confucian histories by putting in all the scandalous detail they so scrupulously leave out. Arrowroot is a beautiful example of the perculiarly Japanese genre of fiction known as the "essay-novel". Discursive, meditative, poetic, it describes the journey of two friends some seventy years ago into a legend-haunted mountain region southeast of Kyoto, one of them searching for information about a lost imperial court that took refuge there in the fifteenth century, the other for understanding of his long-dead mother.