The Music Box Maker of Kyoto
A Novel

About this book:

Rain falls on the tiled roofs of Kyoto's Teramachi district, where thirty-one-year-old Reiko Mizushima restores eighteenth-century singing bird automata in her grandfather's antiquities workshop. When a mysterious silver cylinder hidden inside a Rochat brothers music box yields a microscopic scroll dated August 12, 1945—three days after Nagasaki, three days before surrender—Reiko discovers her gentle grandfather Jiro may have been Captain Mizushima of the Imperial Army's secret Technical Research Institute. The scroll speaks of altered ledgers, suppressed records, and hidden keys. But Jiro, now eighty-two with failing eyesight and hands stained by seventy years of brass dust, has only ever claimed to be a civilian repairman who spent the war fixing water gauges in Osaka.

As autumn deepens into winter, Reiko pursues the truth through the labyrinthine world of Kyoto's master craftsmen, shadowy collectors, and the city's own carefully preserved secrets. Each restored gear and calibrated spring brings her closer to a wartime network that turned precision horology into something far more dangerous than timekeeping. The songs trapped in these mechanical birds were never just melodies—they were messages, maps, and perhaps something far more valuable that men killed to protect and died to conceal.

*The Music Box Maker of Kyoto* is a masterwork of historical mystery that winds the intricate mechanics of antique automata into a profound meditation on memory, craftsmanship, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. For readers who loved *The Clockmaker's Daughter* and *All the Light We Cannot See*, this is a novel that ticks with the heartbeat of history—where every gear has a purpose, every silence holds a song, and the most delicate mechanisms are the ones that bind a family together.