A Dream of Tosa

This is a completed historical (foreign history) novel on Qidian, written by Zhou Yuansi, about 1.41 million characters and 166 chapters, the final chapter titled "Ceaseless Flow." The story begins with a young modern Chinese man visiting a friend in Japan: near Kochi (the old province of Tosa) he accidentally touches a treasured ancestral sword and falls into Japan's Warring States period, becoming the orphaned heir of the Tosa Kira clan, the young lord Kira Keijiro Kagenobu. In seclusion by the Yoshino River he is saved by a hunter's daughter, Kamikawa Konatsu; she serves him as a samurai would a lord, and the two scrape by on the margins of a war-torn world. When the Chosokabe clan's destruction of the Kira and their plot of murder-by-proxy gradually surface, Kagenobu decides to leave Tosa and seek out the still-rising Oda Nobunaga in Owari. He then lives through the Battle of Okehazama and joins the Oda march on the capital, navigating the feuds of the warlords through his foreknowledge of where the era is heading and his read of the situation, slowly growing from a mere vassal into a power commanding a region and administering the Kinai. Nobunaga's death knocks history off its rails, ushering in an age belonging to the time traveler himself. Rather than a smooth road to domination, the book concentrates on the customs, institutions, cultural psychology and logic of behavior of the Warring States period; the facets of Nobunaga's character and the ins and outs of the Matsudaira Nobuyasu affair are repeatedly dissected. It ends with Kagenobu's retirement and a dream both real and illusory, drawing together the questions of achievement, loyalty and "who am I," leaving a lingering backward glance.