El autor presentaba la edición italiana de este libro, que tuvo un éxito extraordinario, con estas palabras: Ésta no es una novela. Ni siquiera es un cuento, Ésta es una historia. Empieza con un hombre que atraviesa el mundo, y acaba con un lago que permanece inmóvil, en una jornada de viento. El hombre se llama Hervé Joncour. El lago, no se sabe. Se podría decir que es una historia de amor. Pero si solamente fuera eso, no habría valido la pena contarla.

In 1860, France's silk trade is threatened by an epidemic. To obtain uncontaminated silk worm eggs, a young man goes on a clandestine journey to Japan--where he falls in love with a lovely, non-Oriental concubine. This critically acclaimed narrative, seamless as a piece of fine silk, plays on the imagination, haunting as a strain of beautiful music.

When an epidemic threatens to destroy the silk trade in France, the young merchant Hervé Joncour leaves his doting wive and his comfortable home in the small town of Lavilledieu and travels across Siberia to the other end of the world, to Japan, to obtain eggs for a fresh breeding of silk worms. It is the 1860's; Japan is closed to foreigners and this has to be a clandestine operation. During his undercover negotiations with the local baron, Joncour's attention is arrested by the man's concubine, a girl who does not have Oriental eyes. Although the young Frenchman and the girl are unable to exchange so much as a word, love blossoms between them, conveyed by a number of recondite messages in the course of the four visits the Frenchman pays to Japan. How their secret affair develops and how it unfolds is told in a narration as beautiful, smooth and seamless as a piece of the finest silk.