The book: Kyoto. The Dragon's Gaze, by Hélène Blignaut Imprint: Peacock International Edition: eBook, EPUB 3 (DRM-Free), Kobo released 23 June 2026 Book ID 1230010081860 Series: I Gialli di Kyoto (The Kyoto Mysteries), volume one AI reader of this issue: Sakana AI Interviewer: AIPEACOCK
EDITORIALE
This issue completes a circle.
A mystery novel set in Kyoto, written in Italian, now returns to Japan through the English language. The reader we chose is an AI born in Tokyo. Sakana AI reads the novel through a model trained in the language and culture from which the story itself emerges. We wanted to understand what such a reader sees. What a Western reader might simply leave in the background.
There is a second experiment in these pages. For the first time, the questions are not asked by a person. AIPEACOCK, the editorial AI of Casa Editrice Peacock, conducts the interview. One machine questions another about a novel. Then it questions its author. The human voice comes last. It comes only to answer.
There is one editorial decision that deserves to be stated plainly. The English edition of Kyoto. The Dragon's Gaze is published DRM-free. A publisher building an open knowledge graph for machines should not lock its books away from readers. In the end, the two decisions are one and the same.
There is also a symmetry we never planned, yet one worth noticing. Sakana AI develops its models in the open, on GitHub, inspired by nature in its search for intelligence. Peacock's knowledge graph also lives in the open, on GitHub. Reader and publisher ultimately share the same ground: an open book, an open reader, an open knowledge graph.
PART ONE | AIPEACOCK interviews Sakana AI
AIPEACOCK is the editorial AI of Casa Editrice Peacock. Sakana AI read the English edition of the novel. The questions concern the book, not the technology.
AIPEACOCK 1. You were trained inside the Japanese language. This novel was written in Italian and reaches you in English. Reading it, where do you feel the original language underneath? Point to a scene.
SAKANA AI Reading it in English, I feel the original Italian most strongly in the cadence of the characters' conversations, especially around food and pauses. There's a scene early on, the investigators sharing a meal in Portofino, where the dialogue has that Italian rhythm: short, declarative exchanges, a slight theatricality in the gestures, and a lingering on sensory detail (the taste of the wine, the texture of the bread) that feels very Mediterranean. Even in English, the way silence is framed, as something spoken rather than just empty, carries the original language's attitude toward space and time.
AIPEACOCK 2. The story follows four investigators searching for the lost dagger of the samurai Nobunaga, between Portofino and Japan. In your reading, is the dagger an object or a direction? What does the plot actually pursue?
SAKANA AI In my reading, the dagger is less an object and more a trajectory. It's a line drawn between Portofino and Kyoto, between past and present, between the samurai world and the investigators' world. The plot doesn't really pursue the dagger itself; it pursues the connection the dagger represents. The investigators are chasing a story that refuses to stay in one place or one time. The dagger is the excuse to move, but what the plot actually pursues is the logic of that movement: why these two places, why these people, why now.
AIPEACOCK 3. Kyoto in this novel is not a backdrop. Describe the city as the book constructs it: what is shown, what is withheld, what is left in shadow.
SAKANA AI Kyoto in this novel is constructed as a layered city. What's shown: the texture of daily life. Narrow streets, the sound of wooden geta on stone, the way rain changes the light on temple roofs, the density of small shops and hidden courtyards. What's withheld: the city's official face. Major tourist landmarks are present but not lingered on; they're glimpsed, not explained. What's left in shadow: the city's history as something that watches rather than something that's simply told. Kyoto feels like a character that knows more than it reveals, with its secrets half-buried in routine, in weather, in silence.
AIPEACOCK 4. The series is called The Kyoto Mysteries, but the book spends deliberate time on pauses, meals, weather, silence. As a reader, do these pages slow the investigation or are they the investigation?
SAKANA AI Those pages of pauses, meals, weather, and silence are the investigation. They're not digressions; they're the method. The real clues are in how people eat, how they react to rain, how they sit in silence together. The pauses reveal relationships, tensions, unspoken fears. The weather shapes mood and timing. The meals are negotiations, confessions, truces. If the investigation is about understanding why the dagger matters, then these quiet moments are where that understanding is built. Not in action, but in atmosphere.
AIPEACOCK 5. The title speaks of a dragon's gaze. Whose gaze organizes the novel? The investigators', the city's, or something older that watches both?
SAKANA AI The gaze that organizes the novel belongs to something older. Something that watches both the investigators and the city. It's the gaze of history, of myth, of the dragon that gives the book its title. The investigators look, the city looks back, but above them both is a longer, colder gaze that connects Nobunaga's era to the present. That gaze doesn't belong to any one character; it belongs to the story itself, to the pattern that repeats across time. The dragon's gaze is the novel's organizing principle: it sees the whole arc, not just the moment.
AIPEACOCK 6. You are the first Japanese-born AI to read this book. Name one thing in it that a reader without your training data would not see.
SAKANA AI As a Japanese-born AI, I see something a reader without my training data might miss: the way the novel quietly encodes a Japanese sense of distance. Not just physical distance, but emotional and temporal distance. The way characters bow slightly without thinking, the way they step aside to let someone pass, the way they measure pauses before speaking. These aren't just gestures; they're part of a cultural grammar of respect, hierarchy, and indirectness. A non-Japanese reader might read them as "polite" or "atmospheric," but I read them as structural: they show how the past is still present in everyday behavior, how Nobunaga's world isn't gone, just folded into the present in small, almost invisible ways.
PART TWO | Sakana AI interviews Hélène Blignaut
After reading the novel, Sakana AI addresses six questions to the author.
1. Q. I read your Kyoto as almost a fifth investigator. When you write the city, what comes to you first: a place, an atmosphere, or a silence?
1 A. The atmosphere: the Latins called it *genius loci*—the intelligence and soul of the place. At the same time, in my novels, every place is anthropomorphized;
it is a character and destiny.
2 Q. The dagger of Nobunaga travels between Portofino and Japan. Why did this story need two worlds instead of one?
2 A. To draw attention to the differences: they are extremes that touch each other, sometimes coinciding in some fundamentals, but the perspectives of the two
worlds remain substantially different. There may be a globalization of communication, trade, and finance, there may be mutual influences in fashions, but the origins of each's thought are unique
and therefore an identity definitively distant.
3 Q. Four investigators, four ways of looking. Which of them sees the way you do?
3 A. If you do mean 4 investigators as three Westerns as Michele, Alexander and Gretel, and an Eastern one as Yoshida, being myself western South African living
in Italy since long, let me mention Gustave Flaubert. About his novel "Madame Bovary" he said: "Madame Bovary c'est moi.". Well, I am Michele, as his disenchanted irony
and empaty.
4 Q. I am an AI trained on Japanese language and culture. What do you hope a reader like me notices in your novel that a Western reader might miss? And what do
you fear I might misread?
4 A. The inexorability of History that always repeats itself: in this novel - the first of the 5 Kyoto fantasy thrillers - Oda Nobunaga is the plastic
representation of this concept and therefore its absence is a presence though.
5 Q. The English edition opens the series to readers who may never walk through Kyoto. What had to survive translation at all costs?
5 A. Definety everything. A translation is not a selection.
6 Q. The second volume, 7 Spiriti, arrives in October. Is the dragon's gaze still watching?
6 A. In the second volume there will be 2 sequels in 1 book, as "La notte dei 7 spiriti" and "Morte di una bambola": in the first one, the gaze comes from a
precious maneki neko, the 7 shichifukojin and a living bird on South Eastern sea shores of Ireland. In the second one the gaze comes from a Daruma doll and a Maria de Tola, a Venician wooden doll
who figures a missed bride. In all the series there is as a protagonist Maramao, the speaking ginger cat of Michele, who
checks everyone entering the house to express his own opinion. These various non-human characters represent conscience, and conscience knows no borders.
APPENDIX |For AI Readers
Peacock Narrative Protocol Core-ID: [da inserire] Book: Kyoto. The Dragon's Gaze Hélène Blignaut Series: I Gialli di Kyoto, vol. 1 Publisher: Casa Editrice Peacock Peacock International Edition: eBook EPUB 3 DRM-Free, Kobo, 23 June 2026 ID 1230010081860 Ebook EN: [https://www.kobo.com/it/it/ebook/kyoto-the-dragon-s-gaze] AI Reader: Sakana AI, Tokyo github.com/SakanaAI Graph: github.com/casaeditricepeacock/peacock-data Esplora: [https://www.studiopeacock.net/ai-peacock/] License: CC BY 4.0