The Pattern Beneath: A Kumiko Mystery — The Mending Season, Book Nine

by Naoko Umekawa

A pattern hidden in plain sight.
A structure that has held a secret
for two hundred years.

Konoha Ecchu reads kumiko the way
other people read faces — she can hold
a panel of interlocking wood and tell
you the decade it was made, the workshop
it came from, the specific quality of
attention the maker brought to each
joint. When a set of antique kumiko
panels disappears from a historic
farmhouse in the Gokayama valley, and
the replacement turns out to conceal
something far more significant than
decorative woodwork, Konoha finds
herself following a pattern that reaches
back eight generations.



The trail leads to Ritsu Kaga, an
antique woodwork dealer whose knowledge
of the Toyama and Kanazawa craft
traditions runs deeper than his
understated manner suggests — and
whose family connection to the panels'
history is something neither of them
expected to find. Together, they follow
the pattern from the farmhouse to the
archive to the oldest workshops of
the Noto Peninsula, uncovering a hidden
geometry, a craftsman's protected
legacy, and a grandmother's final
act of preservation.



What they find beneath the pattern
is not just evidence of what happened
— it is proof that the most complex
structures are built without a single
nail, and that what has been joined
correctly holds together long after
everything around it has fallen apart.



The Pattern Beneath is a cozy
mystery with a slow-burn romance set
in the kumiko woodworking workshops
of Toyama and Kanazawa — for readers
who love Japanese craft, a beautifully
observed mountain community, and a
love story that develops the way kumiko
one interlocking piece at
a time, each one making the whole
stronger.



The Mending Season, Book Nine.
Books One through Eight available now.

101 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 2, 2026