When Hyoma learns an unsettling new piece of information about Botan, he decides to take a much-needed break from the Nagatsuki household. Unsettled herself, and reeling from Hyoma's absence, Botan takes matters into her own hands and vows to learn more about her past and her own abilities. Since her family will sugarcoat the truth, she instead pays a visit to the head of the Kadomori Saenome. Will he give her the answers she seeks? Or is Botan, separated from all those who protect her, putting herself in a dangerous situation?

It's been two months since Hyoma moved in to the Nagatsuki residence, and he's starting to feel like part of the family. Sure, there's a marriage proposal that both he and Botan are trying to ignore, but overall, things have gone smoothly. As Botan begins her third year of university, Hyoma continues his specialized training. That is, until a high-level tsukumogami challenges him to a fight. This tsukumogami knew Hyoma's siblings--and also knows the paper umbrella tsukumogami who murdered them. And he knows something else, too--a secret that could shatter Hyoma's peaceful life!

On their way to Tokyo, the Nagatsuki tsukumogami run into a strange roadblock--a whole group of paper umbrella tsukumogami who are after Botan. Suzuri manages to send a message to Botan in the nick of time, alerting Hyoma and the others at the Kadomori estate that a group they thought were allies are actually aligned with the paper umbrellas. A concentrated attack separates Hyoma and Botan from everyone else, and this time, Hyoma is determined to protect Botan at all costs--even if it means casting aside his chance for vengeance.

The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns--political, social, and religious--are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which covers about 150 years of births, deaths, and happenings in late Heian society, a golden age of court literature in women’s hands. Takeshi Watanabe contends that the blossoming of tales, marked by The Tale of Genji, inspired Eiga’s new affective history: an exorcism of embittered spirits whose stories needed to be retold to ensure peace. Tracing the narrative arcs of politically marginalized figures, Watanabe shows how Eiga’s female authors adapted the discourse and strategies of The Tale of Genji to rechannel wayward ghosts into the community through genealogies that relied not on blood but on literary resonances. These reverberations, highlighted through comparisons to contemporaneous accounts in courtiers’ journals, echo through shared details of funerary practices, political life, and characterization. Flowering Tales reanimates these eleventh-century voices to trouble conceptions of history: how it ought to be recounted, who got to record it, and why remembering mattered.