In the summer of 1975, Spain's 82-year-old leader Francisco Franco is fading fast. Spain's underground radical groups are determined to tarnish El Caudillo's legacy and, if possible, alter the direction of Spain's future.
While it's hardly the sort of situation in which you'd expect Japanese to get involved, this novel by prolific author Osaka Go (nom de plume of Hiromasa Naka, age 66) has deservedly won three literary prizes.
The narrative, conveyed in flashback, is told in the first person by protagonist Ryo Urushida, the savvy operator of a small public relations outfit that represents a musical instrument manufacturer. Urushida's client invites Jose Ramos, an elderly master guitar craftsman, to visit Japan, and Urushida is recruited at the request of Ramos to recover a valuable guitar, known as the "Red Star of Cadiz," that a young Japanese musician had stolen from Ramos' workshop in Spain two decades earlier.