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New releases by Hawaii authors
"Cloud of Sparrows"
Takashi Matsuoka
Delacorte Press, $24.95Some novels are just filled with blood and thunder but are so awkwardly written that they create involuntary cringing. Others are beautifully composed, with exquisite attention to detail and the roll and cadence of language, but they are about nothing at all but the author's ability to spew words. There is no center, no weight. A sly, sprawling and exquisite
samurai epic
Reviewed by Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.com"Cloud of Sparrows" manages to be both interesting to absorb and inspiring to read. The characters are vivid, the landscape fascinating and the work is gorgeously crafted.
It takes us into the most decisive era of Japanese history, the end of the Tokugawa era and the opening of the closed empire to the West. The ways of the samurai are disappearing, and Western concepts are infiltrating the Japanese psyche. The shell is cracking. It is nothing less than a national and cultural destabilization of seismic proportions, and the future, once clear, is growing misty.
Matsuoka plays with the dueling concepts of fate and destiny. He does this through a mix of characters that trail their cultural legacies behind them like chained baggage -- a minor Japanese nobleman whose visions of the future cause him to question the nature of class and fate; another, older lord whose visions have driven him bloodthirstily mad; a beautiful geisha/ninja whose roots soil her forever; another beautiful American missionary woman (but viewed as grotesque and misshapen by the Japanese) who's very aware of the past she's trying to escape; an ornery American gunslinger trying to outrun his reputation.
What lifts "Cloud of Sparrows" out of the romantic/adventure genre is the pure eloquence of the writing. The style is excessively formal and stately, which suits the melodramatic sprawl of your basic pomp-and-slash samurai epic.
Losing your head in feudal Japan seemed to be a daily occurrence. It's a wonder there are any Japanese left.
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