Todd Shimoda

Prestigious Tokyo art curator Keizo Yukawa is hired by robotics magnate, Ichiro Ono, to create a monumental museum for Ono's ancestor, Takenoko, who painted a view of Mt. Fuji every day for a year. Yukawa soon finds all is not as it seems with Ono and his intensely dysfunctional family, all of whom have inherited pieces of Takenoko's genius and madness. Will Yukawa survive his descent into their strange world? The novel is full of dangerous aesthetics, visionary artificial intelligence, and delightfully dark humor. Over four hundred works of art in the book tell their own story of creative obsession.

Pulsing with intrigue, full of provocative ideas, the novel Autumn Wind, Weeps alternates between computer programmer Gina Ono's reach for the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, and a wandering poet of five hundred years ago, Akikaze, who is searching for poetic luminosity. If the two worlds collide, like matter and antimatter, they will explode.

Prestigious Tokyo art curator Keizo Yukawa is hired by robotics magnate, Ichiro Ono, to create a monumental museum for Ono's ancestor, Takenoko, who painted a view of Mt. Fuji every day for a year. Yukawa soon finds all is not as it seems with Ono and his intensely dysfunctional family, all of whom have inherited pieces of Takenoko's genius and madness. Will Yukawa survive his descent into their strange world? The novel is full of dangerous aesthetics, visionary artificial intelligence, and delightfully dark humor. Over four hundred works of art in the book tell their own story of creative obsession.

Pulsing with intrigue, full of provocative ideas, the novel Autumn Wind, Weeps alternates between computer programmer Gina Ono's reach for the pinnacle of artificial intelligence, and a wandering poet of five hundred years ago, Akikaze, who is searching for poetic luminosity. If the two worlds collide, like matter and antimatter, they will explode.

In this genre-bending, speculative historical novel set in Europe at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, Austrian composer and spy, Phillipe Wolf, sets off an incendiary clash between Isaac Newton and Antonio Stradivari over how to create a perfect violin. Can science and mathematics alone be enough? Or is it a much deeper knowledge that Stradivari will take to his grave? In love with Newton's niece, Catherine Barton, Wolf and Barton compose a perfect score for a perfect violin, while Wolf spies on her jealous employer, infiltrates a violent counterfeiting ring, and leads a surprise attack inside the enemy's fortified citadel. On every page there is surprise, insight, and suspense, and in the end, perhaps, solves the enduring mystery of why 300-year-old Stradivarius violins remain the most revered. With several Newtonesque drawings by the author.

In this genre-bending, speculative historical novel set in Europe at the height of the Age of Enlightenment, Austrian composer and spy, Phillipe Wolf, sets off an incendiary clash between Isaac Newton and Antonio Stradivari over how to create a perfect violin. Can science and mathematics alone be enough? Or is it a much deeper knowledge that Stradivari will take to his grave? In love with Newton's niece, Catherine Barton, Wolf and Barton compose a perfect score for a perfect violin, while Wolf spies on her jealous employer, infiltrates a violent counterfeiting ring, and leads a surprise attack inside the enemy's fortified citadel. On every page there is surprise, insight, and suspense, and in the end, perhaps, solves the enduring mystery of why 300-year-old Stradivarius violins remain the most revered. With several Newtonesque drawings by the author.

A fortuneteller hires a detective to find her missing son in this existential noir mystery. A startling clue leads the detective into the underground worlds of fortunetelling and "pleasure" tours. The missing son reminds him of an old case which ended badly, one he is compelled to reopen. As he investigates both, he finds his life becoming more ghostlike. Todd Shimoda has published four novels on Japanese themes. The books have been translated into six languages with over one hundred thousand copies printed worldwide. Todd was also the recipient of the Hawaii Literary Arts Council's 2010 Elliot Cades Award for Literature.