On stopover in Japan, I wandered through a replica village of old Edo, with dwellings, stores and workshops--some of them in lively action today. Boso-no-mura (in Narita) provides an authentic setting for many samurai films and TV series. For me it recalls the Sano Ichiro novels by the gifted Laura Joh Rowland, who writes detective novels set in Edo in the early 16th century. The first novel is Shinju. Today I was able to imagine this street thronged with Rowland's characters.