Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by dimitribelgium
Cloud Of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka
3.0
When a psychologically disturbed senior samurai shows up who masters the art of fighting with two katanas , you know you're in Shogun territory. It's worth taking a slow ride. Matsuoka can pass an important plot point or beautiful vignette by you in the flash of a geisha's eye.
The perceptive & receptive prince Genji is borderline implausible, but any story set in pre-Restauration Japan needs a foreigner-friendly perspective to sell. It remains the ideal period setting to reflect upon the strengths, flaws and compatibilities between two cultures. The reader always shares in the Bildung process.
Genji's subtle attentions towards the well-being of the people around him show life between the lines of history. An immature, heavily indepted bodyguard and a spinster handmaiden are steered towards the happy stability of married life. A teenage farmer's daughter who wouldn't mind a one night stand with an entitled but handsome nobleman remains untouched, her father handsomely rewarded for his hospitality instead.
Don't ask how a Wild West gunslinger wins a bamboo swordfighting contest on a few hours of training against warriors who could sever before they were toilet-trained. Just don't. The book rushes into its ending with the greatest implausibility of all: a traumatised Anna Leonowens migrating to Japan in the 1860s is one thing, the reverse quite another.
It's a lousy set-up for sequels. We knew that Genji's vision of the first Diet must either return by epilogue or sequel unless the pace quickens from Shouru's horse to his visions of Tokyo commuters. But at this point, we have been dipped again and again in the dark past of these two strangers in a strange land.
We want to see them overcome their demons. We also want to see the schism among Japanese nobility play out: those too entrenched in the outer aspects of tradition to accept the dawn of the new age, and those that want to "enrich the land en strengthen the army" so that their values can survive behind the protection of Western knowledge and technology.
The perceptive & receptive prince Genji is borderline implausible, but any story set in pre-Restauration Japan needs a foreigner-friendly perspective to sell. It remains the ideal period setting to reflect upon the strengths, flaws and compatibilities between two cultures. The reader always shares in the Bildung process.
Genji's subtle attentions towards the well-being of the people around him show life between the lines of history. An immature, heavily indepted bodyguard and a spinster handmaiden are steered towards the happy stability of married life. A teenage farmer's daughter who wouldn't mind a one night stand with an entitled but handsome nobleman remains untouched, her father handsomely rewarded for his hospitality instead.
Don't ask how a Wild West gunslinger wins a bamboo swordfighting contest on a few hours of training against warriors who could sever before they were toilet-trained. Just don't. The book rushes into its ending with the greatest implausibility of all: a traumatised Anna Leonowens migrating to Japan in the 1860s is one thing, the reverse quite another.
It's a lousy set-up for sequels. We knew that Genji's vision of the first Diet must either return by epilogue or sequel unless the pace quickens from Shouru's horse to his visions of Tokyo commuters. But at this point, we have been dipped again and again in the dark past of these two strangers in a strange land.
We want to see them overcome their demons. We also want to see the schism among Japanese nobility play out: those too entrenched in the outer aspects of tradition to accept the dawn of the new age, and those that want to "enrich the land en strengthen the army" so that their values can survive behind the protection of Western knowledge and technology.