Tentōmushi

Shirakawa-gō, Japan, 1783.Fourteen-year-old Chiyo has spent her life beneath the steep thatched roofs of an isolated mountain village, where survival depends upon family, duty and the ancient bonds between neighbours. Winters are merciless, food is precious, and every household understands that no one survives alone.Then Chiyo begins to notice the ladybirds.The villagers call them tentōmushi - insects of Heaven’s path. With their brilliant red shells and seven black spots, they are regarded as creatures of good fortune, protectors of children and messengers drawn towards the sun.But another belief begins to take hold.That the seven spots represent the Seven Sorrows of the World.That a ladybird can carry human suffering upon its back and take it away.At first, the belief offers comfort. A grieving mother finds hope. A frightened child feels protected. Families struggling through hunger and loss begin to believe that perhaps sorrow does not have to remain theirs forever.But hope can become dependence.Dependence can become desperation.And desperation can make good people do terrible things.As famine, brutal winter and tragedy tighten their grip on Shirakawa-gō, the villagers begin asking more of the tiny red insects - and eventually more of Chiyo herself. What began as an act of compassion slowly becomes expectation, ritual and sacrifice.Chiyo must decide whether she will accept the burden others have chosen for her or challenge a belief powerful enough to consume the very community it was supposed to protect.Because sorrow cannot simply disappear.Someone must carry it.Set against the mountains of eighteenth-century Japan, Tentōmushi: Seven Sorrows is a dark historical novel about grief, superstition, family and the dangerous transformation of hope into certainty.It is also the imagined story behind a legend.A story passed from parent to child, altered by generations and carried far beyond the mountain village where it began - until people remember the seven spots, the promise of good fortune and the little creature believed to protect children and carry humanity’s sorrows towards Heaven.But legends rarely remember everything.And sometimes the part they forget is the reason the story needed to be told in the first place. 6