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| The Cover of Shinju |
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Buy books by Laura Joh Rowland at Amazon.com |
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| The Cover of Shinju |
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Buy books by Laura Joh Rowland at Amazon.com |
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Welcome to a world where hard-boiled detective meets samurai traditions and culture. Enter Sano Ichiro, the Shogun’s special investigator of unusual crime. This series of mystery novels are a wonderful romp through Tokugawa-era Japan. The sights, sounds, images, smells, and textures of a world so far removed from our own are artistically and lovingly painted by the hand of Laura Joh Rowland.
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These novels are good fun to read, full of all things mysterious and magical that we image about Japan. This world is a world of romantic love suicides, decapitation trophies, exotic body art, concubines and women of the night, court intrigue, betrayals, forbidden love, killer kiai powers, ninjas, samurai sword fights, and martial arts galore. If you are a Japanophile and die-hard lover of all things Japanese, these novels are a dream come true.
But they are, you must realize, all part of a dream.
Naturally, there are about a billion things that are easy to criticize about these books. The author plays fast and loose with a few things: the culture, the history, the language, the societal roles of women, and just about everything else but that is just fine as far as I am concerned. There is lots of interesting and pretty accurate stuff here too. I like the little historical or literary tid-bits tossed in from time to time. There are things about Japan that I did not know and I thought that was great. There are other things that I know too well, and have to just turn the page with a forgiving spirit. Anyway, the adventures are always interesting and good reading. The characters are well developed and the writer has excellent style. This is fun fiction glued into historical fiction which is fused into wishful thinking and dream imagery, and there is nothing wrong with taking an escape from reality once in a while.
These books are great airport reads. I usually can get through one between Narita and Vancouver airports. They are a page-turning delight. These stories kind of build on one another, but you can pick up any individual novel easily enough and just fall into the story. Rowland, in both hoping to key readers into her previous novels, as well as catch Kenji-come-lately readers up to speed refers back to former escapades to keep the present story in its context.
As a country, Japan has quite a bit of popular culture that glamorizes, embellishes, illustrates, and presents its samurai eras in manga (comic books), movies, TV dramas, art, cartoons, and video games. Appropriating the samurai for our own recreation and enjoyment is something that the Japanese are no strangers to. We should not really feel too culturally insensitive if we don’t get all the details right. Rowland may sense this as well, and as a result really goes off in a variety of different tangents, giving herself license to play fast and loose with a variety of themes, ranging from the sexual to the magical to the supernatural, as well as all things bushido.
Book reviewers compare Sano Ichiro, the detective in these stories, to Sam Spade. I don’t think that parallel works very well, snappy though it may seem on the rave pages preceding the novel’s interior. These stories are not of the “hard-boiled” variety at all. They are really quite different. They are designed to add a sense of magic and wonder to the Japanese, their history, and their culture. The grittiness and flat dialogue that makes hard-boiled detective stories so cool just doesn’t apply here. The two modes of narrative just don’t jive with each other. Nevertheless, the texture and tone of these stories is evocative and enjoyable, so let’s just leave it at that.
Getting on an airplane anytime soon? Grab one of these novels and put it in your pocket.
Fun fantasy reading! Enjoy!
Mark Groenewold
Kanazawa, Japan
September, 2005
This page is copyright © 2005 Mark Groenewold