AUTUMN BRIDGE

Characters from Matsuoka’s bellicose Cloud of Sparrows (2002) return for the calmer tale of an aristocratic family’s extra-sensorily perceptive inheritance.

Time folds in and out of itself, and characters chat across the centuries as members of the lordly Okumichi clan cope with the family curse: an ability to see, but not to change, the future. The prognosticatory DNA spliced itself into the gene pool in the 14th century when Go, a turncoat Hun whose mother always said she was a witch, crossed over from the seemingly invincible Mongol invaders to cast his lot with the samurai. Go’s daughter, Lady Shizuka, endures a childhood made hellish by the madness of unsorted futuristic visions, then when she outgrows them focuses her forward look on a long-term relationship with 19th-century descendant Lord Kiyori, grandfather of Genji, the brilliant samurai who understands that it is Japan’s fate to become modern. As the Japanese nation copes with the problems of the New, Lord Genji must cope with the perplexities of Love and Race embodied in exquisite American ex-missionary Emily Gibson. Christian sensibilities notwithstanding, Miss Gibson has it bad for Lord Genji. Since the collapse of her evangelical denomination, Emily has busied herself working on the translation of recently unearthed Okumichi family scrolls, missives from the past that hint at Emily’s own arrival and family involvement. Genji, by the way, is the member of his generation who has inherited the view of the future, but rather than seeing everything he has only three visions, teasingly revealed over the stretch of the story. Such tension as there is in this pretty but rather slow drama comes from the plottings of Lord Genji’s many reactionary enemies, pressures on Emily to choose an American husband, Genji’s own end, and the fate of his son, a native of San Francisco.

Pleasant Asian take on the always reliable Aga saga.