In his 1993 novel "Hanauzumi," Junichi Watanabe pictures a prosperous farming village in Saitama. The year is 1868. The Meiji Restoration has just occurred. The shogun has been overthrown. The teenage Emperor Meiji has been conveyed from the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto and installed in Tokyo. Great changes are afoot, pregnant with greater ones to come.

And yet not a ripple of this has reached the Saitama village, all of 50-odd km away.

Life flows on to its age-old bucolic rhythms. Of the world beyond the village, the locals are neither informed nor curious. When they gather to talk it is not of politics, upheaval and revolution but of the youngest daughter of the village headman, who has mysteriously returned from the home she married into three years before — why? What can it mean? Friction with the mother-in-law? No, she's too clever a girl for that ...