When disaster strikes, when election returns are in, when scandals break, when the ubiquitous racial and sexual tensions of our land blow their PC gasket, when the famous die, it seems the monied men of Wall Street are always the first to craft our national anxiety into a joke. The cynical, educated, three-steaks-a-week, house-in-the-Hamptons representatives of the Ayn Rand in all of us generate the jokes that get faxed nationwide. That's the myth,...

"The winter of 1578, four years prior to the Honnnoji Incident. Araki Murashige has betrayed his ally Oda Nobunaga and holed himself up in Arioka Castle--but a string of strange incidents within the castle walls has him at his wits' end. The desperate warlord's only hope in solving these mysteries is imprisoned in the castle's dungeon: a man named Kuroda Kanbei, one of Oda's most gifted strategists. When all the conflict and intrigue reach their end,...