TRANSLATION: The Tsurugisan Scroll

The fifth book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto

THE SECRETS OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN

The fifth book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto arrives at last in the place toward which the entire pursuit has been driving — the forbidden domain of Awa on the island of Shikoku, and the sacred mountain that rises at its heart. From a midnight leap into a storm-driven sea at the close of the fourth volume, Norizuki Gennojō and the woman he has vowed to see safely to her father wash ashore on a coast where outsiders are not permitted to live. They climb inland in the white robes of pilgrims, and behind them follow the three men who have hunted them across half a country.

In Tokushima Castle, the lord of Awa is at the height of his confidence. The fevers and dark humors that nearly broke him in the previous volume have lifted; his face is burned dark by the salt wind; his fortifications are complete and his powder stores are full. The signal fire that will summon the western lords and the noble houses of Kyoto to the cause against the Tokugawa is ready to be lit. The omens, Hachisuka Shigeyoshi tells himself, are good. He does not know that the two enemies who escaped him on the night of the storm are at this moment climbing toward Tsurugisan — Sword Mountain, where his oldest secret is held in a stone cave, and where every ridge and footpath is watched by the harashi, the silent rustic warriors of Awa who answer to a master no one has ever seen.

Gennojō climbs the mountain to recover what the storm took from him. Otsuna climbs to find a father she has not seen since childhood. The three samurai who hunt them climb because they must finish the work they began on the docks of Osaka. And somewhere above them all is a secret that will shake the Shogunate.

The Tsurugisan Scroll is the fifth book in the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Naruto Hichō, the century-old serial 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 Yoshikawa’s great adventure into the sealed mountain country where the villains and the hero are at last in the same dark territory, and where the secret the conspirators have killed to protect now lies within reach.

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