The Golden Naginata

Tomoe Gozen, the legendary female samurai of Japanese mythology transposed into the mirror-world of Naipon, continues her journey through a realm where the legends and magic that Japan once had now walk the earth. Her quest in this second volume involves choices between duty and freedom, between the obligations of her warrior code and the pull of her own desires, culminating in her claiming the weapon that will define her legend.

Allison Hiroto brings both the epic scope and the intimate personal stakes of the story into balance, her narration grounding the mythological elements in Tomoe's specific emotional experience. Her voice gives the Japanese-inflected world its proper quality of beauty and danger coexisting, and she handles the combat sequences with the same care as the more reflective passages. The audiobook preserves the novel's particular achievement: a fantasy that draws on Japanese mythology without reducing it to mere exoticism.