On the eve of the Meiji restoration, as a slumbering Japan awakens and turns its eyes westward, an innkeeper finds a baby named Jiro in a drifting boat; his only companion a glittering blade, the Dagger of Kamui. When Jiro is thirteen, his adoptive family is murdered and Jiro is blamed, only to be rescued by Tenkai, a priest, who trains him in the mysterious arts of the Ninja…