While writing this book, I kept wondering: what would Naruto be like if its setting were an anime-style martial arts world?
And so this side-story volume came into being-the Drifting Duckweed Volume.
Some aspects of the setting differ greatly from the original, so just enjoy it for what it is.
All the characters appearing here are adults. This is a series of stories about what happens after the Naruto from the main story discovers that he has crossed into a martial arts version of the Naruto world.
A body born like glass beneath the waves, with Jianghu as ink, inscribing limpid skies.
Now and then, bonds with gulls dissolved upon the sands; at times, light rain fell before the eaves.
Stars filled the river, all their shadows passing; clouded mountains beside half a pillow all became the road.
Then, on a night when winds ceased and waves grew still, he sat and watched the Milky Way take the water's shape.
Snow drifted thickly, like countless fragments of sighs, wrapping this silver-clad country in layer after layer.
The frost and snow of the decade since that great fire had frozen more than rivers and earth. They had also frozen the faint memories, buried deep in people's hearts, of the spring the previous Daimyo had promised.
The caravan moved slowly across the boundless snowfield, leaving two deep wheel ruts behind it.
With the wind and snow of the Land of Snow, those tracks would soon disappear.
Asama Sandayu pulled his winter clothes tighter, but his gaze pierced the swirling snowflakes to settle on the figure standing as straight as a pine at the head of the caravan.
The hem of the Wandering Swordsman's navy-blue cloak snapped in the cold wind like an unyielding banner.
He carried no conspicuously expensive weapon, yet