Stories that tell History

In our collection Stories that Tell History, we publish stories that let readers experience the Cultures and History of different countries and civilizations through the lives of their characters.

SYNOPSIS

Some books are written to tell a story, and some are written to give an entire age back its life. This one belongs to the second kind.

In the 1830s, Japan was living through the last years of an isolation that had already begun, at its edges, to show fissures — and Edo, a city of more than a million people, was the stage on which that quiet transformation rehearsed itself daily, though no one yet recognised it by the name history would later give it. It was a city where a samurai's rank no longer sufficed to fill his table, and where a merchant's fortune, however great, still bowed before a sword that could barely cut anything at all. It was this world — the pre-dawn fish markets, the moneylenders who grew rich on other men's debts, the festivals that for a single night erased the boundaries between classes — that I set out to reconstruct with the rigour historical discipline demands and the freedom only fiction allows.

It is within this portrait that the story of Yoshinori and Kiku takes root: he, heir to a samurai house whose honour no longer has a stipend to sustain it; she, the only daughter of an oil merchant whose wealth the law pretends not to see. What begins as a chance meeting by the Nihonbashi bridge becomes, over the course of a single year, the thread running through everything else: the debts, the customs, the negotiations, the slow and irreversible drawing-together of two worlds the law itself swore to keep apart.

The Bridge at Nihonbashi is, then, two things at once, neither less true than the other: a novel about love, money and honour — and a study, lived from within two families, of how contemporary Japan began taking shape long before it ever chose to open itself to the world.

The book is published in digital EPUB format and in print-on-demand, available on Amazon and through IngramSpark’s extensive network of over 40,000 bookstores and retailers around the world.