#5 Platform - Across the Nightingale Floor

It may not really be Japan, but it's got the feel down right.

Book #43: Across the Nightingale Floor
Author: Lian Hearn
Provenance: Bookmooch

Here's a book I picked up because of a recommendation by kitkabbit. I like Japan probably quite a bit more than the next person, and so I tend to be very wary about books that purport to get Japan without really being Japan, or even that try to get Japan at all in novel form. Capturing the feel of it is pretty difficult, I think, even if getting the trappings isn't so hard.

What a nice surprise it was, then, when this book really did feel about right for the older, pseudo-Japan setting that it was aiming for. Sure, geographically, it's not Japan, even if the place names are (Yamagata is very important here), but it's definitely meant to be that way; even the idea came to her when she was living in rural Japan. But the writing is spare, and the characters' thought patterns seem to work. Even the dialogue comes across about right.

The plot's pretty interesting, as well; a teenage boy taken in after his village is destroyed by a powerful lord, and is trained to become his successor and help solve some political problems the lord is having. There are a lot of machinations, and they're not always telegraphed, which is nice. Further, the other main character, a woman who's been a political hostage since age 7 and is now 15 and coming into her own as a potential power, is asked to go off and marry the lord to secure an alliance. The story is told from alternating perspectives, and the characters are fairly well realized, even if I don't really feel much of a change in style between the two (the boy's is first person, the girl's isn't).

Anyway, the plot works pretty well, with a good amount of action and such on top of some romance and some political conniving. I enjoyed it enough to go straight into the second one, so you know there's got to be something there.

Next up: Grass on His Pillow. Book 2, and nearly half done already.