The Blade of the Courtesans
I’m mostly recovered from illness, though I still want to sleep too much. My review wrestling is over, though, at least for the moment! That review I was having so much trouble with has gone up, for Vertical’s The Blade of the Courtesans in today’s Otaku Bookshelf column and Manga Recon.
The Blade of the Courtesans is a Japanese historical novel set in at the beginning of the Edo period by author Keiichiro Ryu. The book was nominated for a Naoki Award in Japan, but I found it incredibly difficult to review mainly because, to be perfectly honest, I really disliked it. You can find out why by reading the review, but… yeah. I try really hard to write balanced, objective reviews for Manga Recon, much more so than I do here where I figure it’s my place to talk about how things affect me personally. This time, though, it was really hard. Not that I had to scrape to find good things about the book to discuss. It does have good points. But the less good points were really difficult for me to get around, particularly those concerning the roles of women in the story.
Now that I’ve finished the review, I’ll be interested to look around online and see what other people thought. I really respect Vertical and what they put out there, so it actually quite pained me to grade this as I did. I wonder if other people would agree with my assessment, or if I’m just too picky about the wrong things. I guess I’ll find out!
January 25th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I have not read the book, but your review comes across as honest and fair.
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Melinda Beasi Reply:
January 25th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thank you, Deanna, I really hope that’s true!
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January 26th, 2009 at 7:33 am
Melinda,
Congrats on getting the review done. I haven’t read the book either, but you did a great review that let me know it’s not a book I’d be interested in. The breaks in the narrative to give a history lesson would drive me nuts too. There’s a reason Tolkien set up the Rivendell council chapter the way he did. It let him give all the back story he wanted without disrupting the flow of the book. People like Tolkien make it looks so effortless you forget they spent a lot of time thinking out exactly how to put it all together.
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Melinda Beasi Reply:
January 26th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Ed, thank you. You know, I think if the guy had just written a non-fiction book about the Edo era, or even just courtesans in the Edo era, it would have been an interesting book, and I might have enjoyed it very much. He obviously really knew his stuff, and had a real passion for it. Then again, it’s a little obvious that the novel was kind of a wish-fulfillment thing for him. When you look at the main character, whose first name is extremely similar to his… I mean the guy is perfect. He’s perfectly virtuous, perfectly strong, all the women fall in love with him, he gets all the sex in the whole book (which in a book about a bunch of brothels is fairly impressive). I can’t blame the guy for wishing he was a great samurai who gets to save a lot of really grateful women from certain doom, but, well, that’s what fanfiction is for. Heh.
But everything I just said there is kind of mean. Which is why you didn’t see it in the review. :)
Anyway, thank you for reading my review, and for your kind words. And you’re right, it does make me appreciate Tolkien that much more.
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January 26th, 2009 at 7:41 am
I found your review to be most interesting. After all your anguish over it, it reads well. It reads fair and honestly without cruelty, I’d say.
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Melinda Beasi Reply:
January 26th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Thanks, mom! As I was mentioning above to Ed, there are a lot of things I could have said that would have been actually mean. I tried to avoid that. I hope I did.
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