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inarizushiii 's review for:
Ink
by Amanda Sun
After the disaster that was Flame in the Mist by Renee Ahdieh, you'd think I would have learned my lesson to not read books set in Japan but written by non-Japanese authors. Apparently, I am a fool.
I'll start with a disclaimer: I live in Japan. I speak Japanese. I work in a Japanese high school. So I may notice and be bothered by mistakes and inaccuracies that the average reader can more easily gloss over. But, Lord, there are so many. The author apparently studied abroad in Japan when she was a high school student, but I couldn't find any reference anywhere to how long she was there. Judging from the level of detail and accuracy featured in this story, I'm going to guess it was about a week.
I'll leave the griping about small details (naming practices, school rules, etc.) aside for now - you can look at my updates for those - and focus on the bigger problems - namely, the main character, Katie.
Katie is a white American girl who moves to Japan to live with her aunt after the death of her mother and gets involved in a bunch of nonsense with Japanese gangsters and descendants of gods. The main problems with Katie are twofold - her suspension-of-disbelief-breaking language skills and her complete uselessness in regards to the plot.
Despite having only started studying Japanese (I believe) five months before the story begins, Katie is able to converse with every character in Japanese fluent enough to the point that every single conversation sounds like it's taking place between two American teenagers (and often includes phrases and expressions that can't even be translated into Japanese, but that's another matter). Her narration mentions her struggles with the language, but we never see any. She can have conversations with vocabulary advanced enough to trip up N1 Japanese speakers . . . after five months? The author easily could have set the story at an international school in Japan, or simply mentioned that Katie's friends were returnees or half or something, but, no, instead, Katie has a supernatural ability to speak a new language fluidly and completely naturally in the time it takes most people to learn self-introductions, days of the week, and the weather. (Also, we readers understand the characters are speaking Japanese. There's no reason to throw in random, easily-translated Japanese words or even full sentences except for the author to show off how she totally knows Japanese, u gaiz. Is this fanfiction.net in the year 2006?)
Secondly, Katie did nothing. Her boyfriend is a kami, which in this story means a descendant of the ancient Japanese gods who has the power to bring ink drawings to life. He is being chased by the yakuza and rival kami for his abilities. He is tormented by abilities he does not want. He has lost people he loves and been forced to sacrifice relationships because of these abilities. He has to fight against the abilities trying to take him over and potentially hurt people. Katie . . . is there. The ink he uses "reacts" to her. That's it. It's clear Sun wanted to make Katie (again, a white American) a kami also, but realized that that would be ridiculous even by the standards of this nonsense book. However, this leaves the main character as a side character in someone else's plot.
Sun has stated that she didn't want to write a white savior story and she wanted the Japanese characters to save themselves - and while this is admirable, therein lies the problem with Katie. If Sun didn't want to write a white savior story, why make the main character white? Why not have a fully Japanese cast? Or if you want to write the fish-out-of-water story, why not have Katie be a Japanese-American returning to the ancestral homeland she has never lived in before? This would have solved multiple problems. A Japanese-American Katie could easily have kami ancestry and thus been able to fully participate in the story. Her language skills would also make more sense - maybe her parents sent her to Japanese lessons when she was young, or she occasionally spoke Japanese over the phone with her grandparents or something. White Katie ends up both overpowered and underutilized.
In conclusion, if you want a poorly-written book with a useless main character who plays almost no role in the plot (what little of that there even is) that reads like it was researched by reading LiveJournal recaps of early 2000s J-drama episodes, boy is this the book for you. If this is not the case, stay far, far away.
I'll start with a disclaimer: I live in Japan. I speak Japanese. I work in a Japanese high school. So I may notice and be bothered by mistakes and inaccuracies that the average reader can more easily gloss over. But, Lord, there are so many. The author apparently studied abroad in Japan when she was a high school student, but I couldn't find any reference anywhere to how long she was there. Judging from the level of detail and accuracy featured in this story, I'm going to guess it was about a week.
I'll leave the griping about small details (naming practices, school rules, etc.) aside for now - you can look at my updates for those - and focus on the bigger problems - namely, the main character, Katie.
Katie is a white American girl who moves to Japan to live with her aunt after the death of her mother and gets involved in a bunch of nonsense with Japanese gangsters and descendants of gods. The main problems with Katie are twofold - her suspension-of-disbelief-breaking language skills and her complete uselessness in regards to the plot.
Despite having only started studying Japanese (I believe) five months before the story begins, Katie is able to converse with every character in Japanese fluent enough to the point that every single conversation sounds like it's taking place between two American teenagers (and often includes phrases and expressions that can't even be translated into Japanese, but that's another matter). Her narration mentions her struggles with the language, but we never see any. She can have conversations with vocabulary advanced enough to trip up N1 Japanese speakers . . . after five months? The author easily could have set the story at an international school in Japan, or simply mentioned that Katie's friends were returnees or half or something, but, no, instead, Katie has a supernatural ability to speak a new language fluidly and completely naturally in the time it takes most people to learn self-introductions, days of the week, and the weather. (Also, we readers understand the characters are speaking Japanese. There's no reason to throw in random, easily-translated Japanese words or even full sentences except for the author to show off how she totally knows Japanese, u gaiz. Is this fanfiction.net in the year 2006?)
Secondly, Katie did nothing. Her boyfriend is a kami, which in this story means a descendant of the ancient Japanese gods who has the power to bring ink drawings to life. He is being chased by the yakuza and rival kami for his abilities. He is tormented by abilities he does not want. He has lost people he loves and been forced to sacrifice relationships because of these abilities. He has to fight against the abilities trying to take him over and potentially hurt people. Katie . . . is there. The ink he uses "reacts" to her. That's it. It's clear Sun wanted to make Katie (again, a white American) a kami also, but realized that that would be ridiculous even by the standards of this nonsense book. However, this leaves the main character as a side character in someone else's plot.
Sun has stated that she didn't want to write a white savior story and she wanted the Japanese characters to save themselves - and while this is admirable, therein lies the problem with Katie. If Sun didn't want to write a white savior story, why make the main character white? Why not have a fully Japanese cast? Or if you want to write the fish-out-of-water story, why not have Katie be a Japanese-American returning to the ancestral homeland she has never lived in before? This would have solved multiple problems. A Japanese-American Katie could easily have kami ancestry and thus been able to fully participate in the story. Her language skills would also make more sense - maybe her parents sent her to Japanese lessons when she was young, or she occasionally spoke Japanese over the phone with her grandparents or something. White Katie ends up both overpowered and underutilized.
In conclusion, if you want a poorly-written book with a useless main character who plays almost no role in the plot (what little of that there even is) that reads like it was researched by reading LiveJournal recaps of early 2000s J-drama episodes, boy is this the book for you. If this is not the case, stay far, far away.