The Samurai's Secret - A Tale of Forbidden Love (Paperback or Softback)

Can a Japanese samurai of impeccable lineage in Edo period Japan get away with being gay?
Can he break all the rules of society and get away with it?

It all started when an aging samurai took an eccentric interest in a teenage peasant boy who had the unusual gift of writing. One day he brought his son, Lord Okimoto to the peasant’s house. Immediately when their gazes met, the samurai’s son and the teenage peasant, a forbidden love affair formed, an affair which broke all the rules of Japan’s Edo period society and a feudal class so sharply defined that it could cut like a knife.

Four centuries later, an ancestor of Lord Okimoto finds a diary written by his peasant lover unfolding the anguished tale of a forbidden life went wrong, leaving behind a trail of broken hearts, shattered dreams and destroyed lives.

The tale of the gay samurai who put duty and obligations above his poignant love travels one whole circle to arrive to the 21st century in a final twist to this intriguing story of how two young men dared to break all the rules in conservative unforgiving 18th century Japan.

Rei Kimura is a lawyer with a passion for writing about unique events and personalities. She has adopted an interesting style of creating stories around true events and the lives of real people in a number of her books, believing that is the best way of making hidden historical events and people come alive for 21st century readers.With this objective in mind, Rei has touched on historical events like the horrific sinking of the Awa Maru and the Kamikaze pilots of World War II and woven them into touching stories of the people who lived and died through these events.Then there are stories of courage, love and rejection beautifully portrayed in "Butterfly In the Wind" a story of the concubine of Townsend Harris, first American consul to Japan, set against the colorful and turbulent era of the Black Ships. This book has touched the hearts of many and been translated into languages from Spanish, Polish, Russian, Dutch to Thai, Hindi, Indonesian, Marathi.