davramlocke's Reviews (777)

It seems so obvious to merge fantasy with Japanese folklore, and yet so few authors have done so. Fantasy is historically seldom translated, however, so even if there had been a slew of Japanese fantasy books, I likely wouldn't know of them. That Lian Hearn is a British woman living in Australia is possibly the only reason that she has enjoyed some moderate success in the States - writing in English gets an author plenty of readers. I remember picking a copy of Grass for His Pillow, the first part of Tales of the Otori, Hearn's biggest series, and the copy I found had been printed in the Japanese style: a small paper-back with tiny writing and beautiful calligraphy on its cover. I found the book used and purchased it on a whim, wrongly assuming it written by a male author from the States obsessed with anime. I didn't look beyond the front artwork. Little did I know that in Lian Hearn's work I would find the genre that I didn't even know I wanted. Though I've only read The Emperor of the Eight Islands, she has quickly made her way on to my bookshelf in a place all her own.

The Emperor of the Eight Islands is the first book in Hearn's newest series, Tale of Shikanoko. Shikanoko is the series titular character, a young man dispossessed of his rightful land by a greedy uncle. We meet him early, and see the betrayal firsthand, as well as his subsequent journey in a Japanese wild that he must traverse before finding himself before an old sorcerer of the mountain. Through arcane rituals steeped in sex and violence, Shika comes to possess a mask that grants him power and vision into the spirit world.

While Shika is finding his path, we are also introduced to Kiyoyori and his wife Tama, as well as Akihime, a princess from a family closed to the Imperial Throne. While this book is never placed in time, it can be inferred by the power structures and royalty lineages as firmly entrenched in the same eras of classics like The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book. This is intentional as a short search for information about Lian Hearn identifies her as a rabid consumer of all things historically Japan. What's remarkable about The Emperor of the Eight Islands is how well it mirrors those classic texts in style and form. There is no doubt that Hearn has spent an inordinate amount of time reading these great works of literature, and while I am no expert, this feels very much like what I have read of The Tale of Genji, and even shows hints of other classic Japanese literature.

Kiyoyori and Tama both serve to introduce us to the political climate of this mythical Japan, which is one right on the edge of open warfare. The Emperor is dying, and his two sons vie for control of the Throne. The younger son has the backing of a devious wizard known as Prince Abbot, who provides a villain for both Kiyoyori, a noble landowner and loyalist to the rightful king, and for Shika whose brand of wild, chaotic magic stands at odds to Prince Abbot's ordered and pure world.

All of these characters, by the end, converge in a climax that sees an upheaval of everything each of them have known. Hearn manages to wrap up one story, while creating an urge to move on to the next because nothing about Shikanoko's tale is final. By the end of The Emperor of the Eight Islands, it becomes clear that he could even be the true villain.

Earlier, I mentioned that Lian Hearn had managed to capture the style and tone of a native Japanese writer, and this works to both undermine her story and authenticate it. Japanese work is translated into English, and in that transformation, something is lost. Those of us who read and love Japanese literature take this for granted and we don't generally allow it to tarnish those works. Because this book is written in English, we automatically assume it will not lose those aspects so often lost in translation, but because the tone is so similar, something feels lacking. In some ways, I wish that Lian Hearn had taken a Japanese-sounding pseudonym so that the illusion of translation might have provided a barrier to this feeling of missing something. However, that would come with its own, potentially cultural, set of problems.

From a character standpoint, Lian Hearn manages to create a cast of distinct and memorable puppets. Shikanoko, a quiet and introspective young man, is not the usual protagonist, and his quest to reclaim his own homeland sees him continually stumbling into more power than he has any right or ability to control. Kiyoyori is a more traditional samurai-like figure whose loyalty costs him the things he holds most dear, but whose weaknesses seem to carry their own set of failures. Akihime is, unfortunately, not very well developed and only comes into the book towards the final few chapters. I assume we will see more of her in subsequent installments, but I was disappointed that, in Hearn's ability to jump from character to character throughout the novel, that she did not use Aki more in the beginning and middle sections. Unlike Akihime, Tama has an entire arc within the tale, and Hearn does a remarkable job in creating within Tama a Lady MacBeth-like figure that we almost immediately despise, but eventually understand. Medieval Japan, like many ancient lands, was not a kind place for women.

With The Emperor of the Eight Islands, Lian Hearn has opened up an epic tale of questing and redemption, and she creates an immediate investment in this world. I'm a little biased because I love Japan so much, but I think this is worth reading. I hope the next few books enhance the mythological aspects of her world. I want to see the oni and kappas and magical cats that seem so common in Japanese mythology. If she's going to write Japanese fantasy, I hope she doesn't hold back.

I have lost count of how many coming-of-age books I've read in my life. It seems like every author, at some point in their career, writes about someone growing up. Growing up is a universal commonality, and so the success of this type of narrative should be no surprise. I happily admit that when well-written, this is a type of novel that I love.

What I have never read is a book by an Antiguan author, set on the island of Antigua which is itself part of the nation of Antigua and Barbados. Annie John is familiar in its themes and completely exotic in its surrounds. It's also a deeply personal look at the relationship between a mother and daughter, and Jamaica Kincaid's telling of that dynamic is poetic and delightful. 

We meet Annie John in the early stages of her life. She is the child of a Dominican immigrant and a native Antiguan who have a gap of 35 years between them. Annie's mother left her home in the Dominican Republic due to problems with her own parents, and found an unexpected life in Antigua. Annie's early memories of her mother are overflowing with love; a love so encompassing that a turnaround is practically inevitable. As Annie grows up, going to school and interacting with people on the island, the warmth and affection that her mother showers her with is transformed right along with Annie's body. As she approaches her teenage years, a schism develops between mother and daughter that is imaginatively rendered as a black, pulsing organism within each person, a beast that lunges and shrinks at various times. The love that was so powerful between mother and daughter becomes equally powerful as a force of strife. 

Annie is a peculiar main character. She nearly comes off as an antagonist in some portions of the novel, or as the Mean Girl that protagonists in other books tend to villainize. She is smarter than anyone at her school, and quickly develops the kind of charismatic whirlpool that sucks people in as quickly as it casts them out. She has a wild temperament, falling in and out of love with her friends at a moment's notice, and a rebellious nature that the small island of Antigua cannot hold. All of this combined humanizes her and makes her completely likable. We all have a little Annie John in us, and so her actions make sense in the context of her situation, whether its stealing books from the library or flashing her private parts to her friends in a cemetery.

A book set in Antigua, which is to all outward appearances a paradise, serves to dispel the illusions of just that. At some point in Annie John, Annie realizes that what she wants more than anything is to escape this tropical destination. Again, we come on a familiar theme in that children often want to fly from the nest where they were born, no matter how beautiful it is, because to them it is common and lacks the vibrancy of "the other." Annie's strife with her mother only emboldens her to flee, and her intelligence and peculiarities further separate her from the islanders, whom she comes to see as incredibly dull. This malaise that she feels for her home country even manifests itself into an un-diagnosable ailment that almost kills her, and it is not long after recovering that she decides where she will go. That she chooses England, a land of perpetual rain, is troublesome because rain on the island seems to be a manifestation of her illness (she gets better the minute that the rainy season ends), but that's a middling detail easily overlooked.

From what I gather, Annie John seems to be a classic of young adult literature, and I can certainly understand why, but likening this to the young adult books of our own era is like comparing a T-rex to an iguana - they don't build them like they used to. Admittedly, I avoid most contemporary young adult novels. I used to read them until I realized that I was reading the same book ad nauseum. If things have improved in the last decade, then YA authors have my apologies. Annie John might be considered a young adult novel because of the age of its protagonist, but this is not a book to be trapped into genre specifics. No matter the age, reading about the fraught dynamics of a mother and daughter relationship and watching the struggles and triumphs of a young girl growing up are themes that can be beautiful to anyone, and Kincaid's writing is poetic and full of some of the most imaginative metaphors that I've ever seen. She truly makes this a pleasure to read. 

This is my first foray into anything related to Captain Marvel, so take what I have to say with that in mind. I'll review this as a completely stand-alone thing as I have read nothing else about the character.

I like the idea of Captain Marvel as represented here. She is a strong, capable women with some of the strongest powers in the MCU. That said, this storyline is really nonsensical, largely due to the fact that it's time-traveled based which works about once in a thousand attempts. I did like that the time-travel aspects allowed us to see how she got her powers, as it was a way to show that scene without flash-backing the reader (even if the result is the same).

I want to like Carol Danvers as a character, but there's, so far, too much patriotic nonsense and tough guy bravado. I suppose I don't know of too many other characters in Marvel like that, and I find it off-putting. This is a problem with making soldiers into superheroes though, and while Captain America oddly does not suffer from the same issue, I can maybe understand why they would go that route with a female character.

Nevertheless, I'm going to keep reading these and see how they evolve.

Writing weird and quirky fiction,the kind that borders on the fantastic, seems to be a tradition in Japanese literature. Between Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Kobo Abe, and now Yoko Tawada, there is no shortage of puzzling but delightful stories pouring out of Japan. Tawada is no stranger to the Japanese fiction landscape, but she was new to me, and The Emissary, her latest translated work to hit U.S. shores, is one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Despite its at-times mystifying plot, I enjoyed The Emissary much like I did my first forays into those other odd Japanese titans, and consequently am excited to see where my reading of Yoko Tawada goes.

The Emissary features Yoshiro, who is not the titular character but his great-great grandfather, and most of the novel deals with Yoshiro’s caretaking of his progeny, Mumei, a child abandoned by parents in a world where everything is on its head. Despite surpassing 100 years in age, Yoshiro is one of the healthiest and most vibrant characters in the novel. What is not apparent right away is that The Emissary is post-apocalyptic. Tawada masterfully doles out this information, never coming right out to say whether nuclear war ravaged the world or if some alien race invaded our atmosphere. Rather, she gives us a slice-of-life view of people living in Japan in the aftermath of whatever happened. One consequence of this particular apocalypse is that those alive when it occurred no longer age in the same way as those who came after. Children, like Mumei, are often sickly and malformed, have trouble eating or functioning, and it is up the elderly, who don’t seem to age much at all, to take care of each successive generation. No doubt this role-reversal is much in response to Japan’s current genealogical climate, which boasts one of the highest elderly populations in the world. Tawada imagines a world where it isn’t the young taking care of the old, but the opposite, and it’s as heart-breaking as it is hilarious.

We mostly stay within Yoshiro’s head through the book, watching as he cares for Mumei and navigates this new world where Japan has closed off its borders once again so that whatever crises devastated the world remains isolated until it can be dealt with. Tawada pokes fun at an unreliable Japanese government that, despite its new landscape, is likely not a far cry from what current power structures reside. Yoshiro’s sole aim in life is to ensure that Mumei survives in an age that lacks the modern conveniences that we now take for granted. His anxiety is offset by Mumei’s near Buddha-like ability to take everything in stride. Tawada asks the reader to imagine a child growing up without expectations. If one had never seen a television or watched a movie, would they understand boredom in the same way that we do? If they had never tasted exquisitely cooked food, would they realize that their simple fare was lacking? Yoshiro still lives with one foot in the past, but Mumei exists only in this different version of that world.

Tawada does not stay entirely within Yoshiro’s view. Her ability to experiment without losing the thread of her plot is unique. Not only do we jump to Mumei’s perspective at a late point in the novel, but we even see through the eyes of Yoshiro’s estranged wife as well as one of Yoshiro’s teachers. That this all comes in the last third of the book would be strange enough, but Tawada also jumps around in her point of view. Having decried this in the past as unnecessary experimentation, for some reason I accept it in Tawada’s work. The rest of the novel toys around with the very nature of reality so much that I can accept these strange shifts in perspective without feeling annoyed or confused. It works. I don’t fully understand how, but it does.

I don’t love The Emissary, but I do find it fascinating from an authorial standpoint. The experimentation with form and the sheer oddities abounding within Tawada’s work are memorable and excite me to read more of her writing. There just aren’t authors like this, that I am familiar with, in the English speaking world, and I continue to return to Japan for books that bend my brain in new and interesting ways. I feel that there are themes I missed while reading this novel, and metaphors that I may not be equipped to deal with, but that did not stop me from enjoying Yoko Tawada’s twisted reality.

Ms. Marvel is confusing.

I like this volume, and I like Kamala as a character, but there is little about her introduction into the Marvel Universe that makes sense. Perhaps that is intentional, but it makes the pages feel a little empty in this first installment.

Kamala is a relatively normal teenager who loves superheroes, has to deal with being the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, and stumbles into powers that are neither explained nor defined. From what I can tell, she has the powers of Reed Richards and Ant Man combined, though it doesn't seem as though even she knows what that means. At the same time, she dons the name of Ms. Marvel, whose powers seem completely different from her own and I don't entirely understand the established persona theft when this could have easily been an entirely new hero. Maybe she will be at some point, but I doubt it.

That said, this introduction is fun, and while I would have liked to see her figure herself out more, I'm sure that will come. I've no doubt of the importance of this new Ms. Marvel, perhaps the first muslim superhero ever, but that doesn't automatically make this amazing. Nevertheless, I am hooked enough to continue.

It is not often that I so blindly stumble upon a Japanese author without knowing anything beforehand. In this case, I was quite literally browsing library shelves and came upon Ms Ice Sandwich. What a quirky title, I thought, and a Japanese name. I guess I’ll read this. Browsing library shelves, it turns out, has its perks.

Which is a blatant segue to my first point about Ms Ice Sandwich. If someone were to ask me, “Hey David, what would you say is the Japanese version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” I would now have an answer. Both novels feature a young man coming-of-age, one who is shy with perhaps some development immaturity. Both prominently feature women who could be accused of manic-pixie-dreamgirl status if we weren’t past that in our popular culture lexicon (I hope). Each has its quirks, more in Ms Ice Sandwich due to its Japanese nature, and both feature emotional moments powerful enough to induce tears.

However, I do not wish to sell Ms Ice Sandwich short. It is short, clocking in at just over ninety pages, but Kawakami packs meaning and heart into those ninety pages better than some authors who ramble on for 900. The unnamed protagonist of this novel is worth knowing, a “sweet kid,” for lack of a better cliche. He reminds me of myself when I was a young boy, though I was not so sweet, fawning over women and creating elaborate fantasies about them in the safety of my own head. In this boy’s case, he becomes obsessed with a sandwich vendor whom he calls Ms Ice Sandwich. She has electric blue eyelids that cover the largest and most beautiful eyes he has ever seen. He has never said a word to her, and knows nothing about her personality or disposition beyond what she exudes as a behind-the-counter saleswoman.

Much can be assumed about this obsession. The boy’s mother is an absent one, more concerned with her cell phone and pseudo-business than with mothering, and his father is long gone. The boy has friends, but is fairly awkward in school and Kawakami writes him as potentially having some autistic or OCD tendencies. That he would pick one particular human, one as visually strange as he is emotionally, is no surprise. And his love is innocent, pure even, because he seems to be young enough for such emotions to remain untainted by the film of puberty.

As mirror to the young boy is a girl his own age named Tutti Frutti, a nickname that the boy infamously and uncharacteristically draped upon her due to a funny incident involving flatulence. Tutti lives nearby, is more outgoing and irreverent than the boy, and is also missing a parent – in this case her mother. Tutti also serves as mirror to Ms Ice Sandwich, becoming someone the boy can actually talk to and who is more grounded in reality.

My only complaint with Ms Ice Sandwich, aside from perhaps wishing this were a longer work, is with some of the translation quirks. It is almost immediately apparent that Ms Ice Sandwich is translated by a Brit. The repeated use of the word ‘mum’ and the addition of some very non-Japanese phrases like ‘taking the piss’ are off-putting for anyone who has some knowledge of Japanese culture. Having read the majority of my Japanese literature through American translators, I may have glossed over any American buzz words or phrases, and if nothing else this has cued me into the possibility of keeping a more watchful eye. Thankfully these British stains do not otherwise mar a beautiful novella and one that will have me watching for Meiko Kawakami’s name in the years to come.

Another collection that is too vast to properly review. One thing to glean from this collection as a whole, and with any Sandman collection, is how valuable stories are. This volume features an Inception-worthy level of stories within stories, like nesting dolls we open them up and put them back together with every few pages, and it seems bewildering and exotic, but the warm feeling of having lived another life flits through the soul with every tale.