“What begins as a trip to another continent becomes a journey into a Looking-Glass world in which one country’s myth is another’s reality, where centuries are bridged in a single thought and where the ordering principle is that of story. And what an exuberant, multi-skeined traveler‘s tale this is—as full of silent meaning as a haiku, as elegant as calligraphy, comic, compassionate and entirely magical. This one-of-a-kind literary invention captured the jury through the sheer joy experienced in its reading.” — 1999 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize jury (Lynn Coady, Sylvia Fraser, and Eric Wright)