It took several years and a lot of you-know-what. Paper & Ink, travel to Japan, proofreading, cover design, and professional book formatting added up. But it was all worth it. The image above does not include the ISBN number, but each book has one.

The book may be purchased on Amazon in scores of countries. It is also available as an e-book.

One of the more difficult projects was to write a “teaser”— a blurb on the Amazon site. Here it is:

        The novel is based on several actual historical events.

In 1868, a massive cache of government gold disappeared from Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu’s castle. The shogun’s finance minister reportedly removed the treasure and buried it in northern Japan to keep it out of the hands of the advancing rebels.

Historians claim the cache never existed. But concurrent with the disappearance of the gold, Tomita Yuki, a loyalist samurai, and Avery Butler, a retired American Union Army officer, embark on a secret mission with almost a ton of gold.  But their mission ends in a disaster. Tomita is forced to return to Japan without the gold, and his story is lost in the fog of Japan’s civil war. Betrayal and bloodshed threaten to bury Tomita’s legacy along with the treasure, but love and devotion will not have it.

Over 150 years later, Parker West, a private investigator, discovers a Japanese diary in his parents’ attic. Jason Tanaka, a historian, translates it. Doing so almost costs them their lives. Their search takes them to many places, and genealogy helps them unravel the mystery, as does kanji, or written Japanese.

     The novel shares fascinating information about the little-known tragedy involving nineteen teenage samurai, Bushido, the way of the warrior, and John Manjiro, the fourteen-year-old ship-wrecked boy who was the first Japanese to visit and live in America. 

Go to AMAZON and type in “The Shogun’s Gold: Curtis Piper.”