On April 21st 1701, Yazama Jiutarô, a young Japanese samurai is devastated when he and his fellow warriors are informed of the ritual suicide of their master in punishment for a severe offence. The warriors are now ronin – masterless and on the run – but they vow vengeance on the court official whom they blame, promising to return in force at the New Year, December 31st 1702. They know that their revenge, no matter how justified, will only lead to their own deaths by the same ritual suicide.
The band separates and scatters and Jiutarô heads south. As he crosses the sea from the main island of Honshu to that of Kyushu, his boat is hit by a tempest. When the storm abates he finds himself in a world populated by races and species of peoples familiar, strange and terrifying. Believing himself to be in one of the hells he has heard of in myths, theatre and stories, he knows he has to find a way back to the home he is far away from.
Over de auteur
Paul Boyce began creatively writing during his time in the British military and then as a civil servant when producing reports for his auspicious superiors and for industry. He often spends many hours in planning cunning ways in which to kill off his wife, stepson, son and daughter-in-law, and anyone else foolish enough to partake, in a variety of fantasy role-playing games. Unfortunately, he was recently diagnosed with MS which, on a plus side, now gives him plenty of time to tap away on the keys of his laptop. He insists that he won’t work around the MS, it’ll have to work around him!
He still has a very high respect for the use of punctuation, a dying art these days it seems, and cannot abide the puerile use of text-speak, especially by adults (LOL!). He was somewhat dismayed to hear, quite recently, a man in a pub say to his wife “Don’t bother using punctuation in your text, you don’t need it!” What is the world coming to when commas and the semi-colon are consigned to history?
He has already commenced the follow-on manuscripts for Black Harlequin and Far from Home. With luck and a fair wind, and Microsoft Windows 10 permitting, these will both be published in 2016.