“No one stays at East Wind Inn anymore...and who can blame them? A haunted inn. It's said that not even the priests can cleanse it.”

In 12th-century Japan, a young woman samurai encounters torment and betrayal when seeking a night's refuge at a remote inn in the countryside. This is a story of Yamabuki, one of several women samurai of the period who later played major roles in determining the future of the rule of ancient Japan.

In this tale, Yamabuki, cold and wet on a windswept autumn evening, seeks shelter at the East Wind Inn, which is on her maps but is hard to find. When she finally arrives, she's greeted with warmth, sake, and very welcome hospitality. But all is not as it seems. Skeptical of things ghostly and supernatural, Yamabuki undergoes a series of ordeals that challenge those beliefs.

A standalone story within the Pillow Book of a Samurai, Cold Sake introduces Yamabuki, a woman of grit, determination and empathy, the main character in Katherine M. Lawrence's carefully researched multipart saga, The Pillow Book of a Samurai: Tales of the Autumn Creek Land, which relates Yamabuki's role in the epic events during Japan's Heian period leading up to the Gempei Wars that changed the course of Japanese history.