In 1869 Japan, a young woman escapes the confines of her arranged marriage by painting memories of her lover on mulberry paper. She secretly wraps the painting around a ceramic pot that's bound for Europe. In France, a disenchanted young man works as a clerk at an import shop. When he opens the box from Japan, he discovers the brilliant watercolor of two lovers locked in an embrace under a plum tree. He steals the painting and hides it in his room. With each viewing, he sees something different, and gradually the painting transforms him.

Set outside the new capital of Tokyo during the Meiji Restoration and in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, The Paintingis a richly imagined story of four characters whose lives are delicately and powerfully entwined: Ayoshi, the painter, pines for her lover as she dutifully attends to her husband; Ayoshi's husband, Hayashi, a government official who's been disfigured in a deadly fire, has his own well of secret yearnings; Jorgen, wounded by the war and by life, buries himself in work at the Paris shop; and the shop owner's sister, Natalia, who shows Jorgen the true message of the painting.

Exquisitely written and utterly spellbinding, The Paintingreveals the enduring effect of art in ordinary life and marks the debut of a skilled stylist and first-rate storyteller.

"A host of brittle characters populate this oblique historical novel, set in two very different locations at the same moment in history: Tokyo during the Meiji Restoration and Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Debut author Schuyler tenuously connects these settings when Ayoshi, a frantically unhappy young Japanese woman who seeks to escape her hated arranged marriage by painting memories of her old lover, sends off a painting wrapped around one of her husband's ceramic bowls. The bowls make their way to Paris, where the painting is discovered by Jorgen, a disabled mercenary soldier from Denmark sitting out the remainder of the war as a merchant's assistant. As miserable as Ayoshi, Jorgen finds himself drawn against his will to his boss's bastard sister Natalia, who has signed up to become a woman soldier. The novel shuttles back and forth between Japan and Paris, but Schuyler never develops a compelling reason to link the two periods, either in plot or in theme. The historical tragedies of Paris and Japan remain stubbornly separate, just as the characters remain unreachable, too caught up in their own webs of misery to become fully alive on the page. Schuyler opts to forgo traditional punctuation, which lends her prose a spare poetic sensibility, and relief comes from moments of almost haiku-like beauty ('She's like a slice of the moonlight') that break through the gloom. Agent, Michelle Tressler at Carlisle & Co. Author tour. (Oct. 22)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Set in 1870s Japan and France, this atmospheric novel tells the story of a Japanese woman who escapes her arranged marriage by painting memories of her lover, which she secretly sends to an importer in Paris.

Nina Schuyler received her B.A. from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Her stories have appeared in literary journals, including Sojourn Literary Arts Journaland New Town. Her work has been nominated for Best New American Voices and the Wilner Award, and in 2001 she received the Bay Area Fiction Journal Award. Schuyler teaches writing at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco and lives in Fairfax, California, with her husband and son. This is her first novel.