Sword and Blossom: A British Officer's Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

Sword and Blossom tells the tragic true story of an extraordinary love affair that began when a young Army officer fell in love with a Japanese woman in the early years of the twentieth century. Based on a treasure trove of more than eight hundred letters, it chronicles Arthur Hart- Synnot and Masa Suzuki's attempts to make a life together despite long periods of separation, racial prejudice, and political turbulence. Their doomed relationship, like that of their countries, was part of a confused age of extremes and contradictions, of violence and beauty, and of destinies etched out amid the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.