Large paperback in very tidy read condition. Slight creasing to spine.

It is 1868.

In Japan's exotic pleasure quarters, sex is for sale and the only forbidden fruit is love....

Hana is just seventeen when her husband goes to war, leaving her alone and very vulnerable. When enemy soldiers attack her house she flees for her life across the shattered city of Tokyo and takes refuge in the Yoshiwara, its famous pleasure quarter. There she is forced to train as a courtesan.

Yozo, a traveller, adventurer and brilliant swordsman, returns to Japan after four years in the Victorian West to discover that the world he left behind him has been destroyed. He travels north to join his rebel comrades, but is captured during their final battle. Escaping, he makes his way south to the only place where a man is beyond the reach of the law - the Yoshiwara.

There in the Nightless City where three thousand courtesans mingle with geishas and jesters, the battered fugitive meets the beautiful courtesan.