A Storm of Blossoms is a serialized novel series in the contemporary fantasy genre, written from the perspective of a Japanese-American woman named Kyoko Sugiyama. The story is set in a world much like our own, except that many things which for us are just myths are for Kyoko very much real. It is published on this site with a new chapter each Monday and Friday. Interlude chapters and essays are posted as well, with no set schedule.
The story is written entirely in first-person limited perspective. What this means is that the narration is all from Kyoko’s own perspective, and reflects her own beliefs, perceptions, and interpretations. This is, at least, true for the main books, and you can get the basic story with just those books; but there are also interlude chapters spaced out which show other parts of the world, and other perspectives on events, which make the story more complete, as well as extensive out-of-universe notes and discussion on this site. You can engage with as much or as little of this broader context as you like.
The content of A Storm of Blossoms is pretty dark in places, and if you’re looking to avoid triggering material this may be a hard story for you to engage with. Kyoko’s world is not a kind one. The monsters are in charge of things, and the people fighting them are often even worse. Bad things happen to good people on a regular basis. There is graphic violence, and while sex is not explicitly described, this is mostly because I don’t feel it adds enough to the story to be worth writing it out on-screen. It does feature in the story’s content and themes. All of these things are used for thematic and narrative reasons rather than for the sake of grotesquerie or shock value, but ultimately this is not a lighthearted story about heroes defeating villains. A Storm of Blossoms is about the places in between, about liminal spaces and uncertain ethics and finding beauty within the darkness. It is the story of one person’s attempts to navigate a complex world, and how her life unfolds. If that sounds interesting, the story opens here.
This story, including the books and all supplementary material on this site, is released under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, the terms of which can be found on the Creative Commons website here. The summary is that you are free to use and adapt the material, including for commercial use, provided that you adequately attribute the work and you make your own adaptation similarly available.