Reviews with content warning for Racism - The Sword of Kaigen: A Theonite War Story

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

The Sword of Kaigen: A Theonite War Story by M.L. Wang

65 reviews

birdlines's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

“You learn over time that the world isn’t broken. It’s just… got more pieces to it than you thought. They all fit together, just maybe not the way you pictured when you were young.”

This. Book. It made me want to tear my hair out. It made me weep openly in a field. It made me shout angrily at an empty room.

The characters arcs are *chefs kiss*. This book is an alternate futures sci-fantasy with heavy Japanese inspiration with a focus on the military, the spiritual beliefs and the family life of the people in this world. There’s magic, there’s sword fighting, and there’s a mountain full of grief. Pull your pants up if you want to get into this book because it’s a tough ride from page one all the way through to page 630.

We follow the story and perspectives of both fourteen year old Mamoru, and his mother Misaki. Occasionally we go back in time to her youth and explore how and why she ended up here, in this place at this time.

In a mountain village detached from the rest of the empire, the Matsuda line breeds and trains warriors with the powers of the gods in their veins. As young Mamoru, son of Takeru & Misaki Matsuda grows up in this peaceful and isolated place, learning to fight and master The Whispering Blade, he tries to figure out his place in the world.
Takayabi is steeped in lore and tradition, and there are very clear expectations of him. But his foundations are rocked to the core when he meets an outsider and the possibility comes to light that much of what he believes may be a lie.

I can’t get over the depth and breadth of storytelling that went into this book, it’s a masterclass in showing the different sides of inherent culture.

Thanks M. L. Wang for once again breaking my heart and patching it up again, for giving me the adult version of Avatar meets Mulan that I didn’t know I needed, and for making me hate, forgive and love individual characters all in the space of a book.

Content Warnings

wadebarr's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Content Warnings

literatefrog's review against another edition

0.25

challenging slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

they're not like other five year old's
or other six year old's for that matter

Before I get into the bulk my review, there's a few things I want to address first:

For a book published this recently its very disappointing to me to not see any semblance of trigger warnings especially when the triggers in question are as severe as the ones present in this book.

As the trigger warnings are relevant to the plot, I will spoiler tag them and list them below:

Rape/Sexual Assault, Child Death, Domestic Abuse, Child Abuse, War Violence, Racism, Misogyny

I'm sure there are many more applicable but these were the most standout that I would warn my friends of before they consumed a piece of media.
Be warned that it is hard to address all of my discussion points without involving spoilers, so from this point this review is not free of spoilers.

## Characters
Mamoru is your quintessential manga protagonist with seemingly no critical thinking skills due to his upbringing in a society modeled after feudal Japan with extra propaganda.
Misaki, as our other protagonist, spends a majority of the book beaten down by the culture she's been forced to live in.
Takeru is one of the most exhausting characters to have experienced in a story. For the majority of the book we only get to see him as a misogynistic, stuck in the past character who cares only about what he's been told to care about. He's awful to his family, and his only "redeeming" quality is that he can use the bloodline ability of his family which is nothing more than a gatekept technique within his ancestry. He finally is allowed to show emotion once his son has been fridged and his wife is mad at him, where we get to hear his perspective for a chapter and are meant to feel bad for a past we were never told and let that explain his decades of disgusting behavior. Then, his personality flips completely since he's stopped running away from every emotion and every thing that goes wrong in his life where until this point he would leave to go "be the mountain" until he felt better.

## Atmosphere/Setting
It's hard to talk about setting when the few places we get to follow the characters in are so extremely different they feel like they should be in different stories. We have the place attempting to be ancient Japan, which seems to be the only place in Japan that still acts like that, and then we get Canada which is reskinned to be the mean streets of Gotham.

its just attempting to be ATLA and Superhero fanfiction

## Writing Style
This was the most difficult section to consider how to start my review since the 2 most standout offenses are both equally heinous to me. At the end of the day, the biggest offender of this book to me is:
a book should never force its reader to constantly have the [glossary](https://mlwangbooks.com/glossary-main/) on hand to even understand what the author is saying
This point will stay important as I talk about the adjacent and other standout issue of this book:
If you are going to "create" a fantasy world and want to add to your worldbuilding by creating a custom language: absolutely do NOT take an existing language and plagiarize? parody? (I can't find a word that feels most accurate for this) it by sprinkling actual words and phrases from it throughout the book coupled with your own made up words that make it even more confusing to readers who recognize the source material.
In Sword of Kaigen, that language is (primarily) Japanese. Other languages are also thrown into the book in the same way but the main one, and one I will talk about the most, is Japanese as it is rebranded to be the characters' most common language: Kaigenese.
One of the best examples I can reference comes from the first chapter and immediately made me worried about the writing of the entire book going forward.

“Oh. I-I’m Kwang Chul-hee,” Kwang said in a valiant attempt at a Shirojima Dialect greeting. “Yoroshiku onegashimasu.”

“You mean ‘o-ne-ga-i’,” Mamoru corrected him. “Onegaishimasu. And you don’t really pronounce the ‘su’ part unless you’re a little kid.”

Taking a language such as Japanese that uses symbols entirely different from English for their writing and adding it into your dialogue via romanization (the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language AKA "rōmaji") is immediately going to feel out of place.
To then take a phrase and have a character make a mistake in their dialogue that we as a reader can't tell they made is very weird to experience. Regardless of whether or not Kwang Chul-hee pronounced the "su" the next time he repeated this phrase, we would be unable to tell as the phrase will have the character for "su" as part of the spelling no matter what.
This could have just as easily been accomplished by explaining narratively that this Northerner our main character is meeting attempts to greet him with a traditional greeting, but made a mistake in a childish way.

The book then continues to be littered with common Japanese words, phrases, and expressions, most of which are referenced in the glossary as what they translate to in the "Shirojima Dialect." I am supportive of authors wanting to make up their own words to describe what should make their book special, but when those words are being made up based a language not native to the author it starts to feel deceitful. For someone completely unfamiliar with Japanese, they may leave this reading experience believing words such as "bokken", "haori", "mattaku", etc.
Another part of taking from Japanese that feels very weird to see in an English book is honorifics (i.e. "-san", "-kun", "-chan", "-sama", etc.). These are a part of the language that people might be used to from seeing in manga, anime, or any translated media that started out in Japanese, and in those contexts they make sense. If something is originally in a language that has honorifics you won't find in English, they will be present in the translation. This book was written in English, there is no reason for them to exist in the book.

One issue I will bring up that is for a subset of readers: between the immediate start of the book sounding like the beginning to a fantasy martial Japanese inspired manga/anime, even starting with a chance encounter with a "transfer student", the seemingly forced use of romanized Japanese is likely to put the reader in the headspace of this being written like it desperately wants to be a manga/anime. Very off-putting, but not applicable to all readers.

As for the completely made up words many, if not most, of them feel as if they didn't exist until the book was finished being written and then were replaced awkwardly after. The main examples of these being those to do with time and distance:

dinma: roughly equivalent to 0.43s
siira: roughly equivalent to 0.72 minutes
gbaati: 36 minutes
waati: 1 hour and 12 minutes
stride: roughly equivalent to a meter or 3.3 feet
bound: roughly equivalent to 26.4 feet or 7.74 meters
click: roughly equivalent to 1.75 miles

These feel so unnecessary to add, and then to make them not directly comparable to existing units of measurement only adds to the confusion. Saying something happened in a split second makes sense as its an existing phrase in English, but a split dinma? Did it happen in 0.215 seconds? It makes it one layer more confusing to understand the time or distance being described than should happen while reading something.

My final thoughts on the glossary are about the lack of consistency and overall whether these additions are necessary.
Consistency:

Words like "nyama" and "jiya" as well as other ways of describing the abilities are used relatively interchangeably despite their definitions making it seem like they should not be used as such.
The Kotetsus are referred to as "numu" despite not being Yamma residents
“On three we’re going to lift together. Ichi… ni… san!”, the swap between English and Japanese (especially words not even included in the glossary) doesn't feel natural
Necessity
Senkuli is used once in the entire book, and the given plural (senkuliwu) is never used. Glassworking is mentioned on a few occasions, the vocabulary could've been used more to help readers get used to it.

Last, but certainly not least, comments on the writing style are on tropes that are disappointing to see or used poorly. I had to look up a definition of the trope "[fridging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_refrigerators)" because I could tell it happened twice back-to-back just to make sure I was not wrong. The first example was having a Ranganese soldier look just enough like Hiyori to throw off Yukino Dai so he could be killed off. That nameless female soldier existed purely to momentarily demotivate Yukino Dai and made his death feel quite bland for someone who was an important character until then. However, its not nearly as jarring as the death of Mamoru, one of our main characters until this point, truly being only for the additional trauma and later motivation of his mother, Misaki.
Our most important fridging also coincided with one of my least favorite tropes in storytelling, when an author decides to make declarations about the future only to embellish a moment. In this case:
"*A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.*"
In a book with such high stakes where every character is seemingly not protected by "plot armor", why would you suddenly confirm that Hiroshi is safe for the rest of the story only to make Mamoru's final moments seem slightly more important.

My final comment I have no idea where to categorize. I had been told by friends who were reading that the thing this author was best at writing was combat and I couldn't stand the way Misaki's fights were written. Nearly every action she took was framed as “If she were younger she would do this. but she was not younger” or "if [her opponent] knew this was going to happen they would've reacted differently, but they didn't know so they did something else." It feels like an attempt to make her seem more clever than she is so readers might believe she is a capable fighter.

## Plot
The plot of this book feels like it wants to try and speak on themes like being anti-war, anti-government, feminist, etc but struggles to take any hard stances on anything besides being anti-war. Through the gruesome and equal opportunity bloodshed of the war scenes, the anti-war message comes across loud and clear.
When soldiers from the capital or imperial armies show up to try and cover it up and mistreat the grieving residents, it starts to show that this story could very well be anti-government. However, the grand plan of Takeru's at the end is almost entirely "we should all get government jobs." I understand the reasoning of this being a way to exploit their systems and force the government to send money to Kaigen, it is directly getting use out of the system they're trying to oppose and allowing it to continue. At no point do they try to separate themselves and show they can make do on their own, they turn to the government for the help they need regardless of the methods.
Misogyny is introduced in the book by the awful past of Misaki through the perspective of the one woman who has been outside of Kaigen and seen what the rest of society is like and for a large portion of the book exists to make us feel bad for Misaki and other women. Yet again, by the end of the book the misogynistic culture such as her father deciding what's best for her and who she should marry without question of her wants ends up being reinforced by the sudden and forced change of Takeru's entire personality, making it seem like her father was right to do this to her and suddenly all the hardship she had faced was acceptable because the outcome was finally agreeable.

## Intrigue
Truly the only intriguing thing to me about this book was the fact that a friend of mine (and many readers I don't know) have given this book a perfect score, and I genuinely was hoping to find somewhere in the book where I could understand what they liked.
Unfortunately, I did not.

## Logic/Relationships
she keeps using “earthward” despite renaming the planet so it wouldnt be earthward without Earth
Mamoru says isn't hell made of fire, but the word for the afterlife is Laaxara. Use the word if you make it, especially if you're going to name a different country Hades. Its needlessly confusing
Random and unnecessary when talking about fire and water to say “that’s why men marry women”

and oh my god they have a separate term for the afterlife they didn't use until they were ridiculing Kwang Chul-hee for having a different religion

## Enjoyment
The first 6 chapters of this book were some of the most excruciating experiences I’ve ever had reading for what I was hoping to be pleasure. Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m reading this for a book club with friends who I’m looking forward to talking with, I would’ve DNF early into the book.
The saddest part for me is I like to take notes when I read something as I’ve been cosmically assigned a brain that likes to make wikis, and usually its something I do as a love language towards the source material. This was the first time it felt like I needed notes up (glossary especially) to even be able to understand the book, which I believe is what made it hurt the most. After I gave up on doing that (glossary I still had to keep up at all times), I could at least get myself to keep reading.
I’ll try to stop beating the dead horse here, my comments on writing style and logic should suffice as to why I cannot enjoy this book.

Content Warnings

sarajones's review against another edition

5.0

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

apronto's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous challenging hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

yaxzx's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I think this might be one of my top five favourite books of all time. Wang's ability to write such real and amazingly realized characters is one of the best I have experienced in a long time. This review might be a little disjointed, as I will be writing it out of notes that I made after each session of reading this book, starting around the halfway point.

While the book starts off slow for the first 100-150 pages, it really picks up from there and doesn't let up. While the middle third of the book is jam packed with non-stop action, the latter half is then jam packed with emotional turmoil that made for a very emotional experience.

I honestly can't remember the last time I cried from reading a book, but the aftermath of the Ranganese invasion while Misaki is initially dealing with Mamoru's death was absolutely devasting and had me bawling. On that note, Wang is one of the rare authors who seems willing to kill off many significant characters, including one of the protagonists of the first half of the book, for the purpose of having real emotional stakes and consequences. The Wang did this and the way it was dealt with after did an amazing job showing just how brutal and savage war can be, and Wang seemingly had no hesitation in showing it how it is. The research I conduct in my professional/academic life centers around war crimes and crimes against humanity, which often involves first-hand accounts of these crimes by their victims, and the was Wang described the horrors of the Kanganese invasion was very reminiscent of many of the accounts I have read/heard in the past.

In terms of characters, Misaki is probably one of the best protagonists of all time. Talking to my wife about this, I had originally said "one of the best female protagonists," but I think that this qualifier is wholly unnecessary here, and she is simply just one of the best protagonists, in my opinion, hands down. Misaki is such an interesting character, and the way that Wang shows how she must battle the different pulls of honouring herself and honouring her duty/obligation felt so real and well-written.

Having Misaki be so regretful about the choices she made throughout the first half of the book, just for her to start to feel some satisfaction from that choice so much later in life was a really interesting thing to read, especially as this ebbs and flows throughout the second half of the book. The balance Misaki manages to find between the warrior part of herself and the domestic/mother/wife part of herself by the end of the book was really fantastic and well done.

Mamoru is also such an amazing character,

and while I was disheartened when he died halfway through the book, it really paid off overall. As all the violence started with the Kanganese invasion, I found myself falling into the expectations set by unrealistic Fantasy tropes and expected him to instantly be a badass as soon as the battling started, just to have these expectations completely dashed with him stumbling and freezing for a good portion of the battle, ultimately resulting in the death of one of his closest mentors. The fact that it is this death which then spurred him into action, felt quite real when considering he was a fourteen year old boy. It just felt very realistic. I was also quite devasted by the description of how Mamoru is finally able to summon the whispering blade and how nobody will ever know, as this was one of his biggest desire in life, was just magnificently done.

The final character I think worth talking about is Takeru. It has been a very long time since I've disliked a character as much I disliked Takeru for the first 4/5ths of this book. He was just portrayed, from Misaki's perspective, of course, as such a piece of trash. I knew he was acting the way the society he was raised and lived in told him to act, but he just seemed like the absolute worst result of what that kind of upbringing could result in.

This was displayed so well in relative terms by Wang in how Takashi and Kazu being much better characters morally, with the former still having many negative qualities but still being a generally likeable person/character, and the latter just being a genuinely good guy despite the culture he was raised in, largely as a result of his progressive upbringing. With all this said, once we get to "The Duel" chapter, I was so taken back how well Wang was able to completely shift how Takeru should be perceived. It of course did not completely erase much of his horrendous behaviour from the first majority of the book, but the explanation of why he was the way he was, I instantly found myself warming to him in terms of no longer hating him with a burning passion. Wang's ability to so quickly paint such a convincing picture of a broken and traumatized man who was, as a result shut everything out from around him, just trying to do what he thought was best as was taught to him by a broken and corrupt society and a cruel father was absolutely stunning.

With Takeru also, Wang's portrayal did something for me that I didn't think would happen for me while reading a book in my adulthood (as it had when I was a kid): it changed my perspective on the world. Well, to say "change" might not be fully accurate, but it definitely reaffirmed a long-held belief of mine which which had been crumbling lately with the state of the world overall and in relation to my own personal life. That belief being that even some of the most atrocious human beings deserves a degree of compassion and the opportunity to do better.

The deep hate I had felt for Takeru up until the "The Duel" began to slowly and then quickly dissolve while I read this chapter, as he started to explain the 'numbing' he would embrace which caused him to be the way he was and then this hate completely shattered when the perspective shifted to his.

Wang's ability to accomplish this in only 25ish pages was absolutely incredible.

Due to the tagline of the book, "A Theonite War Story," I obviously knew there would be quite a bit of violence, I wasn't expecting just how intense it would get in its description. Wang definitely does not hold back from portraying the realities as war in such brutal and terrifying ways

When Mamoru goes into the Numu village to find all a bunch of women and children slaughter, as well as Misaki's battle in the Matzuda compound and then goes to find Hayori being assaulted, It was honestly so sickening.

Also, Wang's portrayal of blind loyal and faith in a leader, with the empire/emperor, was so damn interesting. What was even more interesting was Wang's portrayal of how this can then shatter so quickly.

Like, ever loyal and subservient Takeru being taken back by the carelessness that the empire he's been ever so willing to serve showed to their people and clearly disrespecting their deaths, quickly followed by his loss of this faith and loyalty was such an interesting read and felt very realistic. I know that the Kaigen was clearly modeled after pre-WWII Japan, and the emperor is essentially thought of by them as a God, so it was so interesting to see how Wang portrayed what it looks like when that type of figure starts to disrespect the same traditional values they've enforced to those who were most subservient to them.

One aspect of the book that I am still unsure of how to feel about was how everything was handled with Robin, especially in that last chapter. I know that Wang had written two books in this universe before The Sword of Kaigen in which

Robin's son is the main character, and I imagine this God-like Theonite is probably expanded upon and a central part of, but introduction of that just felt like such a set up for other stories, which is frustrating when a) it doesn't seem you are really able to get the first two Theonite books anymore and their not even present on Wang's website anymore, and b) Wang clearly has no intention of returning to this world, at least anytime soon.

Overall, The Sword of Kaigen was one of the best books I have read in a very long time, and it honestly affected parts of my perspective which is a rare thing for a piece of fiction, at least for me. I will gladly recommend this book to anyone I speak to about books in the future. If you haven't read this book, do yourself a favour and do so.

Content Warnings

ggcd1981's review against another edition

4.75

dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Content Warnings

gothicmatcha's review against another edition

5.0

emotional sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: N/A

Content Warnings

briarcrawford's review against another edition

3.5

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

trapdorr's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

It was good but I felt like some of the action scenes could have been trimmed and the book shorter. I feel like 1/3 of the book was 24hr span and then the last 1/3 was almost skimmed over. Interesting magic system which I feel could be grown in well in future books. I feel like the book brought in a lot of unanswered questions and only really covered the FMCs character growth journey and not the world issues as much.

Content Warnings

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