The legend of miraculous, blood-red healing crystals, hidden in a secret cave on a remote mountain in Japan, is a lure Captain Rodrigo Oliveiro de Sousa cannot resist. Sale of them will make him fabulously rich. His fiancée, Monique de Champlain, desires them too. She has deep scars for the wondrous crystals to heal. But Japan in the 1620s is a dangerous place for foreigners, especially Europeans. A ronin samurai who calls himself the "Guardian of Jewels"—in possession of an enchanted mirror—also seeks the sacred mountain of Yukitake. When the winner will take all, who will get there first?
Adventure and magical realism twirl together inside the enclosure of a French convent and beyond Japan’s Tokaido road in this illuminating drama of desire and transcendence, where West and East face each other along the same path to the interior.
