It’s the winter of Aoi’s second year in university, and she’s been tasked with planning an exhibition of Ensho’s paintings at the Yagashira residence. As she’s struggling to come up with ideas, she joins a student group aimed at bettering the city of Kyoto, and the Kita-ku ward office asks for their help in revitalizing the Mount Funaoka area. Meanwhile, Kiyotaka receives an unusual request from Atsuko, who runs a flower arranging school and an underground club in Gion, and wants him to investigate her student’s fiancé on suspicion of cheating.

Kiyotaka and Aoi have finally confessed their feelings for each other and are now dating. One day, they learn of a string of thefts in Kyoto: someone is stealing Buddhist works of art from art collectors. Then Komatsu, the detective they met at Yoshida-Sanso Inn, comes to Kura to ask for help finding his missing daughter. The two cases turn out to be intertwined...

Aoi is now in her third year of high school, with entrance exams looming on the horizon. She and Kiyotaka are slowly and clumsily growing closer, but one day, Ensho—Kiyotaka’s nemesis—shows up and asks him to appraise a white porcelain incense holder. However, when Kiyotaka claims that it’s real, the counterfeiter denies it and leaves in an attempt to discredit him. Some time later, Aoi is approached by Ensho after school. Kiyotaka arrives just in time to save her, but then he breaks up with her, sending her into the depths of despair. Two months later, Aoi receives a phone call from the manager. “Kiyotaka came back from Hyogo,” he says. What will become of the two now?

In the states of the former Confederacy, Reconstruction amounted to a second Civil War, one that white southerners were determined to win. An important chapter in that undeclared conflict played out in northeast Texas, in the Corners region where Grayson, Fannin, Hunt, and Collin Counties converged. Part of that violence came to be called the Lee-Peacock Feud, a struggle in which Unionists led by Lewis Peacock and former Confederates led by Bob Lee sought to even old scores, as well as to set the terms of the new South, especially regarding the status of freed slaves. Until recently, the Lee-Peacock violence has been placed squarely within the Lost Cause mythology. This account sets the record straight. For Bob Lee, a Confederate veteran, the new phase of the war began when he refused to release his slaves. When Federal officials came to his farm in July to enforce emancipation, he fought back and finally fled as a fugitive. In the relatively short time left to his life, he claimed personally to have killed at least forty people--civilian and military, Unionists and freedmen. Peacock, a dedicated leader of the Unionist efforts, became his primary target and chief foe. Both men eventually died at the hands of each other's supporters. From previously untapped sources in the National Archives and other records, the authors have tracked down the details of the Corners violence and the larger issues it reflected, adding to the reinterpretation of Reconstruction history and rescuing from myth events that shaped the following century of Southern politics.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

Orphaned at a young age, Alice has lived with her aunt for most of her childhood. But her uncle is abusive and resentful, and at fifteen years old, Alice decides to return home to Kyoto and train as a maiko, eventually hoping to become a geisha. But when she arrives back to the city where she was born, she finds that Kyoto has changed quite a bit in the eight years since she left it. Almost as if it's a completely different world...

"It's 1893. King Kamehameha III of Hawaii declares Sovereignty Restoration Day... Tension grows between China and Japan over Korea... The Bengal Famine worsens... A brilliant scientist in Calcutta challenges the system... The senior priest at Kyoto's Kinkaku-ji temple is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Dr John H. Watson receives a strange letter from Yokohama. Then the quiet, distinguished Mr. Hashimoto is murdered inside a closed room on a voyage from Liverpool to Bombay. In the opium dens of Shanghai and in the back alleys of Tokyo, sinister men hatch evil plots. Professor Moriarty stalks the world, drawing up a map for worldwide dominion. Only one man can outwit the diabolical Professor Moriarty. Only one man can save the world. Has Sherlock Holmes survived the Reichenbach Falls? In a seriocomic novel that radically ups the ante, Sherlock Holmes and Watson find their match in more than one man (or indeed, woman) as a clock inexorably ticks. History, mystery, romance, conspiracies, knife-edge tension; a train in Russia, roadside crime in Alexandria, an upset stomach in Bombay, careening through Cambodia, nasty people in China, monks in Japan--here's a thrilling global chase that will leave you breathless (occasionally with laughter) as the Sherlock Holmes: the missing years series begins"--Jacket flap.