Excerpt from The Forbidden Boundary: And Other Stories On the shoulder of a hill which rose behind the sparkling sea, the straggling little Japanese village seemed quite deserted and abandoned. A stranger gazing at it might have thought that every one had gone to the war, never to return. Not a thing moved, nothing. The miniature European hotel, standing somewhat aristocratically in a broad courtyard, yet quite surrounded by its humbler neighbours, was entirely shrouded in heavy bamboo blinds, as if stunned and shocked by this voluptuousness of summer. It seemed to be hiding more closely than the native houses, until evening had come and the passion of the day had spent itself, because it was an alien, a foreigner, an intruder. Not a soul was moving, nobody. There was only the slowly heaving sea and the twisting coast-line and the blazing sun. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.