Inu-Oh

Inu-Oh

A boy dives for an ancient sword in the waters off Dan-no-ura, where the Heike clan drowned. He comes up blind, and his father never comes up at all. What's left for a kid like that? A biwa, mostly. Tomona learns to play it well enough to join a traveling troupe of storytellers, and for a while that's his whole life. Then he runs into a guy who scares people on purpose, because his body is twisted and he'd rather be feared than pitied. Tomona can't see him. He just hears a voice. The two of them hit it off, and when the stranger discovers he can hear the spirits of the dead whispering stories nobody remembers anymore, they start performing together. He calls himself Inu-Ou. Tomona feeds him music, Inu-Ou dances like nobody in this era has ever danced, and the crowds eat it up. It works. Too well. The shogunate has rules about what theater is allowed to be, and these two are breaking every one of them. The louder the applause gets, the closer the authorities come looking. And behind it all sits the question of who Inu-Ou actually is, and what exactly was done to him before he was born.