The Ghost Artist of Goro

About this book:

In the cigarette-thick air of a 1997 Tokyo manga studio, Minoru draws the world that makes a legend believable. He renders the rot in temple gates, the grain of centuries-old cedar, the weight of a bridge that must hold forty advancing soldiers and one impossible ronin. His name appears nowhere in *Blood of the Ashikaga*. His master, the brilliant and broken Kishimoto, draws only the hero—the face, the fury, the splash-page glory. Everything else—the architecture, the atmosphere, the dead space that gives violence its gravity—falls to the ghost artist hunched over a pine board in the corner, ruling vanishing points into the dark.

But the deadline for the winter special is collapsing, the editor is climbing the stairs, and Kishimoto's trembling hand can no longer draw the structures that anchor his monsters. As the printing presses in Itabashi spin toward midnight, Minoru must construct Kyoto's Sanjo Bridge in a single night—every timber, every bronze cap, every nail head—while navigating the razor's edge between artistic truth and the blood-soaked spectacle the readers crave. In a world where assistants are invisible and masters are monsters, the line between collaboration and exploitation is drawn in india ink.

Atmospheric, obsessive, and forged in the specifics of a vanishing craft, *The Ghost Artist of Goro* is a novel about the invisible labor behind the visible myth—the Architecture of the Shogunate built one cross-hatched stroke at a time, the Screentone Requiem sung in a room that smells of vinegar, stale smoke, and the particular desperation of men who make gods out of paper and deadlines.