Cloud of Sparrows

In 1861, two centuries of Japanese isolation have ended and foreign ships crowd the harbor at Edo. A small party of American missionaries lands just as Lord Genji, a young samurai ruler more devoted to poetry than the sword, finds himself hunted by rivals inside the Tokugawa government. Genji has inherited a family gift for prophetic visions, and one of them ties his survival to the strangers he has no reason to trust. As assassins close in and a civil undercurrent builds toward the fall of the shogunate, the Japanese and the Americans learn to read one another across a gulf of custom, language, and belief.