This will be my first Rant Review. Rant Reviews are reviews of books that are so bad I simply couldn’t put them down – but I hope to warn others about them so that no one else will waste their time. Accordingly, Rant Reviews will incorporate neither the cover nor any links to the book in question. I’m not going to make it easier for people to go out and buy this garbage.
Having read a few of Danielle Steele’s other books and been reasonably well entertained, and having a deep interest in Japan and the Japanese culture, I was looking forward to a good read when I borrowed Silent Honor from my mother. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t pay money for it. While Steele the novelist is up to her usual pacing and the few bits of historical background she throws in are accurate enough (if unsatisfyingly meager), she seems to have taken her views of Japan straight from central casting. Granted, protagonist Hiroko is supposed to be a “typical” Japanese woman, but let’s get real. Nothing, no personal detail, gives her any kind of quirk or individuality that the reader can latch onto. (Yes, Danielle, even Japanese people have a measure of individuality. Shocking, I know.) Furthermore, Steele gets the Japanese language wrong (Hiroko’s last name is Takashimaya, nice and Japanese-sounding…except that it’s the name of a department store, not a surname. Would any American reader take a Japanese author who named his lead character “Mr. Sears Roebuck” seriously?) and some of the situations and actions in the book are just idiotic. Aside from the major behavioral and cultural inconsistencies pointed out by some Amazon reviewers (“typical” Japanese woman of the 1940s sleeps with a white guy…out of wedlock, no less…riiiiiiight), one detail that particularly irritated me was the number of kimonos that tiny, delicate, flower-like Hiroko is able to pull out of the “one small trunk” that she carries to America. (I counted six before giving up – and do you know how much a full kimono weighs?)
If you look around the Net, you’ll notice that readers who gave the book a favorable review seem to fall into two camps: (1) non-native English speakers who undoubtedly liked the book because it’s simply written and easy to understand, and (2) native readers who include comments like “a wonderful introduction to Japan and its mysteries”. Well, the book’s syntax is about at a sixth-grade level, the plot is surpassingly linear, and Steele knows less about Japan than I do about Mesopotamian basket weaving, because I at least recognize that I don’t know anything about Mesopotamian basket weaving.
Any native English speaker who has any background concerning Japan will be able to finish the book only out of a sense of morbid fascination to see how awful the story will get. If you want a decent, non-scholarly story dealing with the Japanese-American internment in California, go rent Come See the Paradise. If you want to read an interesting and informative account of Japanese Americans by a western writer who actually knows something about the subject, read James Michner’s Hawaii . And if you want to learn something about Japan, please, do anything but form your opinions based on Silent Honor. As a writer of enormous popularity, frankly, Steele has an obligation to do better than this. Let’s hope that in the future she sticks to a culture she knows.
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