The novel is fiction. It explores an aspect of modern society that we are not eager, or even willing to look at. We tell ourselves that imperial fascism, financial looting, political insanity, military atrocities, and so forth, are far outside of our daily living and irrelevant as if they didn’t exist. We like to see a world that is ‘flat’ and safe, rather than how it really is. And there is also another aspect that we don’t want to acknowledge, which is actually the real principle of our humanity: the Principle of Universal Love that we simply can’t get away from. We find ourselves reminded again and again that the world really is a sphere, politically and in love, militarily and in sex, ideologically and in romance, contrary to what we believe or fear it is. But why shouldn’t we respond to the truth? Can’t we go on living in the small world of our dreams as devoted members of the ‘Flat Earth Society?’ Oh, why should we remain living in a rut?

The novel presented here is the 2009 Edition of Episode 4B of the epic series of novels, The Lodging for the Rose. A single fictional story is threaded through the series of twelve novels. Episode 4B is staged in the timeframe between the late 1980s and 2007, a period of turning-point events, which correspond with also a major turning point in the story..