BOOK REVIEW
Samurai novel dramatic, sexy, unpredictable
| • | Music plays part in author Matsuoka's inspiration |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
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| "Cloud of Sparrows"
By Takashi Matsuoka Delacorte, hardback, $24.95 |
The Honolulu writer's somewhat mind-bending point is well made. A novel must seem to be true, even if it's a science-fiction yarn that couldn't have happened. It must seem as though it could have happened, and would have happened — and just in that way.
The rule holds even more strongly for a historical novel, such as Matsuoka's just-released "Cloud of Sparrows."
Fortunately, Matsuoka is capable of the kind of honest writing of which he speaks. The story of Lord Okumichi no Kami Genji is what it a samurai novel should be: Dramatic and bloody, sybaritic and sexy by turns, with lots of period costumes, populated by people we come to like or loathe just as we should.
But Matsuoka's novel is a cut above the "Shogun" clones that populate every airport book rack, because he skirts the well-traveled road. The problems he sets for his characters are not the usual ones, nor are their solutions predictable.
A beautiful woman flees America because, being beautiful, she is unsafe; in Japan, where strong men have difficulty looking at her because she is considered so hideous, she finds acceptance. A man slays his family, but he does it to spare them a more horrible fate. A woman is exiled, but for her safety. And a hero is also a racist. Good men go bad, and bad men do good.
It reads easily but intelligently, and you have to force yourself to slow down or it's over too soon.
The opening is particularly masterful, each scene presenting a viewpoint that may or may not be true or whole. Matsuoka allows us into the mind of the geisha Heiko, feigning sleep in order to beguile her seemingly oblivious lover. We meet the haranguing missionaries, the shogun's spy, the clownish lieutenants, the madman who may not be so mad.
One of the problems that concerns Matsuoka is how people are prisoners of their time, but how they can, in extraordinary circumstances, transcend that, if only briefly.
"If you are a fiction writer," Matsuoka says. "What really matters is your heart, not your intellect, not the words. Words are just the second best thing, the thing we have to use to communicate what's in the heart."
Matsuoka's heart here tells a story of love that rises above hatred and bigotry, of the nature of loyalty and friendship, and of authority that takes its obligations seriously.
He is completing a sequel, and a third novel about the Okumichi clan is half done. I, for one, can't wait.
