Ikaho

If you could go now to any place in the world, where would it be? The author invites you to Ikaho, in the mountains of Japan. This is the backdrop for the tale of a strange, chance meeting between two wayfarers, a mendicant priest and a girl. What they learn from each other unfurls something of the very heart of timeless Ikaho.

A novella from Quentin S. Crisp set in the Edo period, Ikaho is in the tradition of the Japanese ninjōbon, or 'books of human feeling'. Warm as an old tale told over heated saké, Ikaho is also a meditation on place, time and eternity, a revolving door of open-ended narrative by which the reader might enter and visit the magical time-and-place known by that name.