Eight million gods and a parade of eerie monsters are only the first strands of a mysterious web that Oyuki must unravel...
In a house built on a mysterious and fabled mountain in central Japan lives the Lord of Winter, one of the four gods and goddesses who govern the changing of seasons. With the arrival of a cursed letter, he and the spirits which serve him find themselves pawns in a carefully-woven plot, a conspiracy authored by an anonymous figure determined to recover something he has lost long ago. Yet the fortunes of all of these figures, great and small, high and low, will be determined by Oyuki, an ordinary young woman who stands at the beginning of an arduous and fateful road. Before the story’s end she will see the awe-inspiring valley of the Kiso River, the hellish wastes of the Deep North, and an obscure farming village seemingly hidden away from the world’s troubles.
Oyuki is uncertain yet decisive, determined to prove herself to those who have taken her in. Yet her real plight is an echoing of a classic motif worldwide: whether she will remain content with a humble, human-scale life, or pass into an alluring existence that is perhaps more glorious, yet full of danger and leading only to tragedy.