Junichiro Tanizaki Four sisters who have been raised in the aristocratic tradition live intertwined lives in changing pre-war Osaka. Far From the Bamboo Grove. The Way of the Sword is explained in this historical novel of the samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi. In one of thirteen unsettling and eccentric stories of ordinary Japanese families, a fish mysteriously appears in a kitchen one afternoon and no one knows why. Later, she alone is released and sent to Chicago and college.
Naomi mother is in Japan when war breaks out and is unable to get home.
Takiko, whose warrior father was killed in battle, finds this a hard rule, especially when her mother remarries a strange country potter. To get away, Takiko accepts a position in the Imperial Court where she falls in love. Her comfortable life is suddenly ripped apart when opposing warrior clans begin a struggle for Imperial control of Japan. A Japanese author tells a strictly British story of Stevens, an elderly butler at Darlington Hall. When the new owner, a Nazi sympathizer, sends him on a trip to rehire a housekeeper, Stevens examines his own life.