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The office of gardens and ponds / Didier Decoin ; translated from the French by Euan Cameron.
Van Pelt Library PQ2664.E37 B8713 2019
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Decoin, Didier, 1945- author.
- Standardized Title:
- Bureau des jardins et des étangs. English
- Language:
- English
- French
- Subjects (All):
- Voyages and travels.
- Fish ponds.
- Carp.
- Fishers.
- History.
- Widows.
- Japan--History--Heian period, 794-1185--Fiction.
- Japan.
- Widows--History--Heian period, 794-1185--Fiction.
- Fishers--History--Heian period, 794-1185--Fiction.
- Carp--Fiction.
- Fish ponds--Fiction.
- Courts and courtiers--Fiction.
- Courts and courtiers.
- Voyages and travels--Heian period, 794-1185--Fiction.
- Genre:
- Fiction.
- Historical fiction.
- Action and adventure fiction.
- Physical Description:
- 308 pages : map ; 23 cm
- Place of Publication:
- London : Maclehose Press, 2019.
- Language Note:
- Translated from the French.
- Summary:
- A mesmerising fable with a difference, set in Japan over 1000 years ago. The village of Shimae is thrown into turmoil when master carp-catcher Katsuro suddenly drowns in the murky waters of the Kusagawa river. Who now will carry the precious cargo of carp to the Imperial Palace and preserve the crucial patronage that everyone in the village depends upon? Step forward Miyuki, Katsuro's grief-struck widow and the only remaining person in the village who knows anything about carp. She alone can undertake the long, perilous journey to the Imperial Palace, balancing the heavy baskets of fish on a pole across her shoulders and ensure her village's future. So Miyuki sets off. Along her way she will encounter a host of remarkable characters, from prostitutes and innkeepers, to warlords and priests with evil in mind. She will endure ambushes and disaster, for the villagers are not the only people fixated on the fate of the eight magnificent carp. But when she reaches the Office of Gardens and Ponds, Miyuki discovers that the trials of her journey are far from over. For in the Imperial City, nothing is quite as it seems, and beneath a veneer of refinement and ritual, there is an impenetrable barrier of politics and snobbery that Miyuki must overcome if she is to return to Shimae.
- Notes:
- First published as Le Bureau des jardins et des étangs by Editions Stock, Paris, in 2017.
- ISBN:
- 9780857057600
- 085705760X
- 9780857057594
- 0857057596
- OCLC:
- 1101086629
- Publisher Number:
- 99982219585
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