قصة الكتاب :
Tōkyō Sōgensha (Sōgen Suiri Bunko), 2010. 455 pp. ¥800. ISBN
978-4-488-47202-3.
Sakuraba Kazuki
Born in Shimane Prefecture in 1971. Has published game novelizations
side by side with original fiction. Gained a large readership
with the GOSICK series, which began in 2003. Received the Mystery
Writers of Japan Award in 2007 for Akakuchiba-ke no densetsu,
considered to be one of her “major early works,” and the Naoki Prize
in 2008 for Watashi no otoko [My Man]. Has many other works,
including novels and essay collections.

“One summer, when she was ten years old, Akakuchiba Man’yō saw a man fly
through the sky. Man’yō is my grandmother.” With those opening lines, the curtain
rises on this saga, which follows three generations of women from the 1950s
to the twenty-first century.
Man’yō, the narrator’s grandmother, was a baby abandoned by “mountain
people.” Taken in and raised by a young husband and wife in the village, she
grows up and marries a suitor from the Akakuchiba family, an old house that made
its fortune in the iron industry and holds sway over the village. Man’yō occasionally
displays the qualities of someone with supernatural powers and is called “Mrs.
Clairvoyant.” Man’yō’s daughter Kemari, on the other hand, makes a name for
herself tearing around town as the leader of the largest female motorcycle gang
in the San’in region. In time, she turns over a new leaf and blossoms as a talented
writer of girls’ manga. Kemari’s daughter Tōko is a completely ordinary girl. Unable
to find any goals in life, she lives as a “NEET” (a young person not in education,
employment, or training). But as she explores the mystery of her grandmother’s
deathbed confession of having killed a person, she runs into the truth of
an astonishing murder.
A native of Shimane Prefecture, Sakuraba Kazuki is one of the preeminent
storytellers of our time. In this big-boned, full-length novel, which revolves around
the rise and fall of a village supported by the iron industry in Shimane, she lets
her magical realistic imagination run wild. Possessing the appeal of both a fantasy
and a mystery, this tale will captivate readers and satisfy them with its recreation
of postwar Japanese history from a female perspective. (NK)