The Naruto Scroll

By: Eiji Yoshikawa

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

THE SECRET REVEALED

The sixth and final book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto brings Yoshikawa Eiji's great adventure to its reckoning. The conspiracy against the Tokugawa shogunate, six volumes in the making, comes at last to the dawn it has been driving toward — and the men who built it, the men who pursued it, and the woman who has walked through its shadow from the canals of Osaka to the sacred mountain of Awa converge on the strait that gives the novel its name.

In the autumn of her recovery, Ochie waits in a tea villa beside the Kamo river in Kyoto, knowing nothing of the man she loves except that he has not come. In the back rooms of Awa, the swordsman-monk Norizuki Gennojō and the woman Otsuna fight their way down from Sword Mountain with the spy's testament in hand and three killers behind them. In Tokushima Castle, the lord of Awa stands at the height of his ambition, the western lords gathering, the signal fire ready, the great enterprise hours from being lit. And on the cliffs above the strait, where every previous volume has been driving, the chase comes to its last great set-piece — the whirlpools of Naruto at slack tide, three small boats in the spirals, a rope shooting out of the white water from a man long thought dead, and a final reckoning between hunter and hunted with the fate of all Awa hanging in the balance.

The Naruto Scroll is the sixth and final volume of the first English translation of Yoshikawa Eiji's Naruto Hichō, the 1926–27 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 completes the definitive English edition of the novel that created the modern Japanese adventure genre — the book that, in the hands of its author, gave Japan its Dumas. A hundred years after Yoshikawa wrote the last installment, the entire work is at last available to the English-speaking reader.