While traveling alone on horseback through a gloomy forest near Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto, Justice Ministry official Sugawara Akitada suddenly comes upon a filthy, shivering urchin who appears to be deaf and mute.
In the previous installment of I.J. Parker's ongoing saga, Akitada's young son Yori had perished in an epidemic, and out of a sense of desolation, perhaps coupled with guilt, he pulls the waif onto his horse and takes him to lodgings in nearby Otsu.
Unfortunately Akitada's act of kindness earns him nothing but troubles from some of the devious locals, who are not the least bit intimidated by his aristocratic ranking and position in the Kyoto bureaucracy.