Having spent a decade and a half in Japan, I have a short tolerance for people who write about the country without actually knowing much about the culture. Thankfully, Takashi Matsuoka — as you might imagine from his name — does not fall into this category. Of course, no one alive today has first-hand experience with shogun-era Japan, but at least Matsuoka doesn’t make the mistake of giving western characters Japanese names and then hoping no one will notice. His Japanese are Japanese, his westerners are western, and the story flows easily back and forth between the two cultural viewpoints.
Summarizing the plot in a paragraph or two would be both difficult and a disservice to the author. I’ll just say that the story is set in the 1860s, just before the Meiji Restoration, and has pretty much everything in it, mysticism, large-scale warfare, romance, individual humor, historical scope, vivid cultural detail. While not as huge and daunting a volume, the novel this book most reminds me of is Shogun. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to get an idea of how the Japanese mind works, as well as anyone who just wants to read a good story. Both Furies and I liked this book, and given our vastly different preferences in novels, it seems to me that this is a book that would appeal to most anyone who was even slightly interested in Japan.
Oh, and the trade paperback edition was nicely edited. Kudos to Dell for doing a good job when most publishers are cutting corners right and left.
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