A review by literatefrog
The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang

challenging slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.25

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.”
  1. 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.
  2. 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. 
  3. 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. 

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