Author: katenepveu

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Shikibu, Murasaki: The Tale of Genji, tr. Dennis Washburn

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In 2005, I began reading The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, with a group of friends on LiveJournal. It was great fun, but we collectively stalled out around chapter 20 or so. I tried again in 2007: I distinctly remember taking the absolute brick of a trade paperback (I was reading the Seidensticker translation) on vacation and getting to the point, about 4/5 of the way through, where the narrative jumps after the title character’s death, but running out of vacation time. (Sorry to spoil a thousand-year-old work.)

I came back to it recently because an entirely different extremely long book wasn’t doing it for me, but I was still in the mood for an extensive immersion. In the fifteen years since I’d last attempted Genji, a new translation by Dennis Washburn had been released, so I gave that a try. And (as you will have guessed from the existence of this entry) I did, in fact, finally read Genji from start to finish.

Washburn’s translation is very fluid and readable. He allowed himself to add very short cultural context within the text, which means that his footnotes are almost entirely confined to poetry references–which, by and large, I could get the purpose behind from context, so did not feel the loss of them. This was especially significant for my reading purposes because going back and forth between footnotes in an ebook is not easy; there are some ebooks that are formatted so that certain readers (such as my preferred KOReader) can display footnotes at the bottom of the page, but this isn’t one of them.

(I don’t have an electronic copy of Seidensticker, but I do of Royall Tyler’s 2001 translation, and he footnotes far more, both because of his translation choices and because he just doesn’t seem to trust the reader as much. For instance, in the first chapter, Genji’s mother dies in one paragraph, and the next says,

He [the Emperor, Genji’s father] still longed to see his son, but the child was soon to withdraw, for no precedent authorized one in morning to wait upon the Emperor. [9] The boy did not understand what the matter was, and he gazed in wonder at the sobbing gentlewomen who had served his mother and at His Majesty’s streaming tears. Such partings [10] are sad at the best of times, and his very innocence made this one moving beyond words.

Footnote 9 advises us that "After the year 905, children not yet in their seventh year no longer went into mourning for a parent, and the present of this story therefore seems to be earlier." Okay, fine. But footnote 10 says, "The death of a parent." You interrupted my reading for that? Seriously?)

Washburn’s translation was also easier for me to read because that added cultural context included a level of straightforwardness that wasn’t present in Seidensticker. To be mildly crass about it, in Seidensticker I was often unsure if the characters had actually had sex, whereas Washburn will just say, they had an affair, or, "she skillfully put him off, parrying his advances until dawn." This is truly important information, because the book’s events overwhelmingly focus on men’s sexual pursuit of women and the consequences thereof.

So while there are the occasional mildly jarring phrases in Washburn, I really do recommend it over the other two most recent major English translations.

I do not, however, recommend Genji as a novel.

It’s true that Washburn’s prose and the characters generated a surprising amount of narrative momentum! However, the suspense for me was genuinely, "How awful is Genji (or the next-generation protagonist) going to be to this woman?" As I said, the book is overwhelmingly about men’s sexual pursuit of women, but more generally, about their feelings of entitlement to access to, and control of, women, usually sexually but also just overall. The book thoroughly recognizes the distress, helplessness, and conflict that these feelings of entitlement cause in women–as do the men, very often, but does it stop them? No. (Sometimes they pat themselves on the back for not actually physically forcing the women, but they still complain to the women about how upset they are and how hard it is not to.)

And indeed this is all about cultural context; back in the day, we read an article by Tyler arguing that high-status women in Genji literally were unable to consent: "no young woman of good family could decently, on her own initiative, say yes to first intercourse." I’m raising this not for the question of how I understand the morality of the characters within their own context (though frequently Genji does understand himself to be in the wrong), but for the simple point that I hate reading about them.

For instance, there’s a long section about Tamakazura, who is the long-lost daughter of Genji’s friend and peer. Genji knew from his friend that Tamakazura’s mother moved away because she was uncertain about their relationship and that the friend wanted to find them both. He discovered the mother … and had an affair with her without telling his friend. He later discovered Tamakazura … and brought her back to his house and claimed that she was his daughter, to buy time while he (1) attempted to seduce her and (2) decided whether to tell his friend the truth, possibly so he could marry her himself, or to marry her off as his own daughter. I sped through this section, but solely because I couldn’t bear not to know how bad it was going to be.

(This is of course not mentioning the infamous early bit where he has an affair with his stepmother; finds her ten-year-old niece who is her spitting image; literally kidnaps her and raises her; and eventually enormously shocks her when he consummates the marriage that only he knew was the end goal. I suppose it’s only my own fault for having continued after that, honestly.)

Also, there are only so many descriptions of the colors of people’s clothes, the elegance of their playing of musical instruments, the beauty of Genji’s face, etc., that I personally can stand reading. I do, however, find it extremely funny that one of the next-generation characters is permanently accompanied by a miraculous "fragrance unlike any scent of this world," especially since this character isn’t flashy in his personal style: "He thus found it troublesome that even when he withdrew behind something to stay out of sight, he couldn’t remain hidden for long before his fragrance gave him away."

Anyway, if you’re going to read this, I do recommend Washburn’s translation; and it does contain sensitive and nuanced characterization that’s very impressive. It’s just that the characterization is uniformly distressing and so, unless you’re attempting to finally accomplish something you started decades ago, I wouldn’t bother.

(As a palate-cleanser, I am about a third of the way through Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book; I am also picking up another group project, this time of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. It’s just started and looks a much easier lift; come join us!)

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Waggoner, C.M.: The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry

C.M. Waggoner’s The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry is set in the same world as her debut, Unnatural Magic, but stands alone perfectly well and is very possibly better, or at least, is much more smoothly paced. I enjoyed it immensely.

I like the start of the book’s blurb, so I shall borrow it for setup:

Dellaria Wells, petty con artist, occasional thief, and partly educated fire witch, is behind on her rent in the city of Leiscourt—again. Then she sees the “wanted” sign, seeking Female Persons, of Martial or Magical ability, to guard a Lady of some Importance, prior to the celebration of her Marriage. Delly fast-talks her way into the job and joins a team of highly peculiar women tasked with protecting their wealthy charge from unknown assassins.

Delly quickly sets her sights on one of her companions, the confident and well-bred Winn Cynallum. The job looks like nothing but romance and easy money until things take a deadly (and undead) turn.

(Winn is the daughter of two of the characters from Unnatural Magic. She is great and I love her. She is not, however, our POV character, because she is much too well-adjusted.)

This book is quite fun and funny, but also does a great job of being spooky, tense, and moving. A good deal of Delly’s life involves trying to care for her mom, who is addicted to laudanum, and all of that is appropriately fraught. And there’s Buttons the undead mouse who says "Bong," or more precisely makes "a deep, hollow boom, like a great bell tolling a few miles off"; he kind of encapsulates the whole range of the book, and I hope there is fanart. Finally, I very much enjoyed not only Delly and Winn’s romance, but all of the different relationships among the women on the team, who are a lovely varied and well-rounded lot. (Is it just me, or did Miss Absentia Dok practically jump up and down asking to be protagonist of another story?)

I think my only quibble is that one subplot falls off the page in the last couple of chapters, possibly to permit an unambiguously happy ending; though, to be fair, the ongoing complications of that subplot had been noted previously. Well, and I wrestled with how the book presents the morality of a significant portion of its plot, and ultimately decided that I thought it was fair; but others may differ, so if (ROT13 spoilers) znahsnpghevat nqqvpgvir qehtf sbe vyyvpvg qvfgevohgvba (/ROT13) is a hard no for you, you’ll want to give this book a pass.

Finally, the book has chapter titles, which I am a total sucker for.

Chapter 11: Wherein Dellaria Encounters an Extraordinary Quantity of Cherries, Does a Disagreeable Amount of Cleaning, and Deepens Her Involvement in Her Terrible Idea

I have no idea if these books are well-known or finding their audience, but I want them to be, so if they sound interesting, please check them out and report back.

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Suri, Tasha: Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash


In the interests of the perfect not being the enemy of the good, here are some very brief thoughts on Tasha Suri’s Books of Ambha Duology, Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash.

I’d vaguely heard of the first of these when it came out, but it was Becca’s recent blog post that made me do grabby-hands: "Highly fraught arranged marriage, terrible magical coercion, and complex rules-lawyering around binding mystical vows ensue!" Because, I mean, come on.

Anyway. These are Indian-inspired secondary-world fantasy about being raised in an empire that’s destroying your culture and ethnic group—one of them, that is, because the protagonists are of mixed ethnicity (and one of them can pass). The books are appropriately dark (do note the "terrible magical coercion" above, which I admit I kind of skimmed over in my enthusiasm about the items bracketing it), but they’re not at all grimdark. I recommend them mostly because they feature a lot of thoughtful complexity about the ways that the society is structured and how people act and react as a result; and secondarily because the central romantic relationships are a particular catnip of mine, "we are being forced together but are going to do our best to resist by being kind."

(They have led to me to think a lot about the use of ethnicity in fantasy, though. There’s such power in literalizing the metaphor into actual magic blood that is forcibly extracted to maintain empire, as these books do; but I nevertheless am reflexively uncomfortable about having that ethnicity be strictly genetically-defined, as these books also do. More is outside the scope of this blog post, and probably a con panel of its own; but it’s a thing that seemed worth mentioning.)

Finally, I vaguely gather that these were somehow associated with YA in the public mind? I don’t know how or why (they’re published by Orbit), and also I don’t object to YA in general, but if being in the YA genre would be a deterrent: they’re not.

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Harrow, Alix E.: Ten Thousand Doors of January, The

Alix E. Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, had been on my to-read list for a while, but I bumped it up this morning since it’s nominated for a Hugo Award. Unfortunately, I found it ultimately dissatisfying in a way that I’ll have to resort to spoilers (in a separate post) to explain.

The book did itself no favors with its opening:

When I was seven, I found a door. I suspect I should capitalize that word, so you understand I’m not talking about your garden- or common-variety door that leads reliably to a white-tiled kitchen or a bedroom closet.

When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting at this yellow-wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can’t see the scars that twist and knot across my skin. You don’t even know my name (it’s January Scaller; so now I suppose you do know a little something about me and I’ve ruined my point).

But you know what it means when you see the word Door.

I know I read that at least once, said "meh," and opened another book instead. If it gives you, as it did me, the impression of excessive tweeness, it is fair to say that it doesn’t carry through. This is a portal fantasy, and as is usual, also a quest fantasy, and the musings about shapes of letters recede in the face of loneliness and oppression and danger—not grimdark levels thereof, mind, but it’s not fluff either. (It remains very engaged with the power of the written word, however.)

January narrates most of the book; there’s also an interleaved manuscript for about the first two-thirds. It’s early in the 1900s in New England, and January’s father, a nonwhite man of ambiguous race, is employed by a very rich white man to retrieve "objects ‘of particular unique value.’" January’s mother died when she was a baby, so she lives her father’s employer, who successfully forces her into the mold of a "good girl" from the time she is seven until she turns seventeen, when the plot kicks into high gear.

When I finished this, my initial reaction was, "well, I appreciate populating the portal fantasy with marginalized people and gesturing at how the early 1900s sucked globally, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much with the portal fantasy besides that." Which may or may not be fair, as I’m not really up on current trends in portal fantasy; I think all I’ve read in that vein is Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart A Doorway. And a book needn’t surprise me, or be doing anything I identify as new, to be good.

But on thinking it over, the book is also—in very typical, even expected, fashion—a fantasy of political agency. And I dislike how that agency manifests in the story, because it is set in our world and is therefore making a statement that I disagree with. Ultimately, that’s my takeaway from this book, since I wasn’t in love with anything else it was doing. For more, see this post with SPOILERS.

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Waggoner, C. M.: Unnatural Magic

I’m logging C. M. Waggoner’s Unnatural Magic for two reasons:

First, it’s absolutely charming;

Second, everything you need to know is in Becca’s blog post, so I don’t really have to write anything myself!

Unnatural Magic is composed of two extremely different storylines that only intersect about 80% of the way through the book. […] This half the plotline has very much a Regencyish fantasy-of-manners vibe, along the lines of Stevermer’s College of Magics, and is fun in much the same way. […]

Meanwhile, in the other half of the plotline, Tsira, a gruff half-troll with a chip on her soldier, rescues Jeckran, a depressed, queer, overeducated soldier in distress, and carries him back to her cave to convalesce. […] She’s the muscle … and the brains … and the boss …. and he’s got good looks and a fancy accent, which occasionally also come in useful!

(Well, except that it’s more queer than the impression I got from Becca’s post; troll gender is self-declared, and same-sex relationships are unexceptional at least a couple of the societies.)

If you like the idea of those characters and their interactions, don’t mind weird pacing, and find the rather 90s’ vibe [*] of the whole thing (as accurately identified in comments) a plus, or at least not a negative, metaphorically run to your nearest book vendor. Bonus: as I write this, it’s only $3 in ebook. I have already preordered Waggoner’s next book, which is set in the same world and due out in January.

[*] There’s a particularly thing that feels highly 90s fantasy, especially in the way it happens ninety percent of the way in, is shown from the viewpoint of a third party, and then hardly comes up at all after!

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Millar, Margaret: Vanish in an Instant; The Listening Walls

And yet, despite putting down a series because it was too dark for me, I somehow ended up reading noir and liking it? I genuinely don’t understand what happened there, and this is going to be a frustrating entry, because I quite enjoyed Margaret Millar’s Vanish in an Instant and I can’t be nearly as specific about why.

I came across a blurb for Millar’s The Listening Walls last fall and thought it sounded interesting, being in a mystery mood at the time. It’s a very time-and-place mystery, about an American woman on vacation in 1950s Mexico; her traveling companion dies, and she … just doesn’t come back. I found it a little chilly but twisty, tight, and astute, and I was glad to discover an acclaimed writer with a big and readily-available back catalog.

I have no idea why I landed on Millar while scrolling and scrolling my list of unread books; I do know that I picked Vanish in an Instant at random. In this one, a woman is arrested for the murder of her presumed lover after being found blackout drunk and covered in blood near his body. We mostly follow her lawyer as he attempts to determine what happened.

On the basis of two books I am declaring Millar a writer who I find compelling while feeling surprised about it. She randomly head-hops, Vanish includes an entirely unconvincing romance, arguably she doesn’t always play fair in the way she presents the third-person POVs … but her atmosphere and the complexity of her characters just pull me in, and the stories feel very well-constructed though in a slightly claustrophobic way.

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Wein, Elizabeth E: Winter Prince, The; A Coalition of Lions; The Sunbird

I feel vaguely that I ought to post something much more momentous for the annual-ish dusting off of this booklog, but quite simply, I wrote a decent chunk of this in another forum, looked at it, and said, hmm, if I expanded this  just a smidge it would be a booklog entry. So:

The Winter Prince, A Coalition of Lions, and The Sunbird are the first three books in Elizabeth E. Wein’s Arthurian/Aksumite Cycle. I’d read The Winter Prince years ago, but never got past the first chapter of Coalition. However, I was told that when the series transitions to Africa, it’s very good, so I somewhat randomly decided to give the whole thing a try again recently.

Like my friend Becca, I forgot a fairly major component of The Winter Prince: “… it’s the incest, the thing I forgot was the incest.” Even by Arthurian standards, there is a lot of it (and that’s not the only kind of abuse by a long shot, be advised). This is an intensely psychological and internal book, told in first-person direct address [*], specifically the Mordred-equivalent telling Morgause about his dramatic experiences with, and highly-conflicted feelings about, his father’s legitimate heir, Lleu. It’s very compellingly done, and if this is your set of tropes, it shall be catnip.

[*] It is not second person, this is the weirdly specific and inconsequential hill I am willing to die on. Everyone says that this, and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower (and another series that is possibly a spoiler to name) are in second person, but they are not, all of these stories are one character talking to another character, and that makes the character who’s talking the first-person narrator.

The series has a somewhat weird relationship with the Arthurian mythos, I guess is all I can say without spoilers; in the second book, A Coalition of Lions, it moves to the Aksumite Empire and is narrated by Lleu’s twin sister, Goewin, who apparently has no analogue in the mythos. For years I held this book an enormous grudge because of its first chapter, but this time I powered through. Unfortunately, though I like Goewin very much, I did not enjoy this book; extremely little happens in it, in a frustratingly-claustrophobic way. I’d been advised that this could be regarded as a transitional book, however, so picked up the third.

The Sunbird is the opening of a trilogy, with a new third-person protagonist, Telemakos, and yes, Coalition probably is skippable. The Sunbird is also about attempts to contain a plague, which I did not realize going in. But that was not actually what made me decide to stop reading these books here. Rather, while I know full well that Wein likes to put her characters through the wringer (see: Code Name Verity), and while I know there is a minimum amount of wringer required for characters who are Lymond-analogues, it turns out there is such a thing as too much wringer for me–especially when the character being wrung is not yet twelve years old. It’s well-done wringing! Just not what I’m looking for. So, having confirmed that this continues by skimming the openings of the next two books, I set them aside.

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Fabian, Katherine & Iona Datt Sharma: Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night


Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma’s Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night is a self-published fantasy 30k novella (Amazon | Smashwords) that I really liked and therefore am setting a timer to write up because, self-published fantasy novella: it could use the publicity.

This is set in a modern London in which Faerie is, sometimes, over the water; that proximity allows magic into our world. Meraud was born over the water to human parents, and is really good at magic as a result—maybe a little too good, because now he’s gone missing, and his girlfriend Layla and his partner Nat have to find him.

So this is a form of fantasy that is more in the Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell line—Dunsany is explicitly name-checked—which itself is unusual and, to me, welcome. (To the Dunsany – Lud-in-the-Mist – Kingdoms of Elfin – JS&MN lineage, I wonder if we shouldn’t add The Face in the Frost? There’s a snowglobe in this story that reminded me of it, and while it doesn’t have Faerie-as-adjacent-or-intrusion, the magic seems to have some similarity. I’d reread it but I’m tired of being cold.)

It is also a story about people who are queer and poly. Layla and Nat are not romantically involved and indeed do not particularly like each other, at least not at the start of the story; but they are both concerned about Meraud and so bring all their sometimes-prickly adult emotional complexities to their partnership. Which allows for both self-insight and growth, and a lovely extension of community and support between and around them. (Also Layla is Hindu and married to a woman, and Nat is Jewish and non-binary.)

I have three minutes left on my timer. I like Layla and Nat a lot; unsurprisingly I also really like Layla’s wife, who I would like to emulate in efficiency and kindness, but basically all the characters are great. The only exception is Meraud himself; I suspect I would not actually like him, but I believe that Layla and Nat care and have good reason, and that’s enough to carry me through.

I thought at first the plot was a high-fantasy quest for a McGuffin, being subverted by a very domestic focus; now I think it’s a fairy tale, unless there’s not actually a difference between the two. (The very fact that it doesn’t matter whether I like Meraud weighs a little on the MacGuffin side, with him as MacGuffin. Maybe.)

Basically, as I said on Twitter, reading this made me feel very cozy and also like dying my hair as a Pride flag. If that, plus some JS&MN-ish magic, sounds appealing to you, definitely check it out. (I will even try to figure out the Kindle loan thing if you are short on cash at the moment!)

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Bergin, Virginia: Who Runs the World? (The XY)

As usual, I read books because I go conventions; this year, I went to WisCon and moderated a panel on the 2017 Tiptree Award and Honor List. The winner is Virgina Bergin’s Who Runs the World?, which will be published in the U.S. this November under the title The XY.

This is a very interesting book that is fundamentally not to my taste. I appreciated how hard it worked to avoid “all the men die” cliches, and its worldbuilding is very thoughtful. (For one thing, it acknowledges that “possessor of a Y chromosome” and “man” are not synonymous.) It has particularly nice intergenerational relationships, which are refreshing. I quibble with the authorial decision to elide all racial descriptions, because intersectionality exists and means that one can’t really focus just on gender; but I will handwave that those kinds of conflicts would have been worked out as part of the mass restructuring of society that took place well before the start of this book.

Unfortunately, the voice is just not for me; this is a YA book, with first-person narration, and, well, here’s the opening of the first chapter:

The hand is across my mouth before I can even scream, the other arm wrapped tight around me and my brain is exploding – instantly – with shock and horror and fear and anger and confusion CONFUSION CONFUSION because who would just ATTACK another person and –

‘Who’s with you? Huh?!’

The voice! Growling and sick and deep and broken and stinking.

MAN
MEN
MURDER
GUNS
WAR
KILL

Every strange and scary thing I’ve ever half heard said about XYs comes bursting into my head, but it cannot be. It cannot be.

I am too old for that narration, and generally for a whole book of a fourteen-year-old discovering that gender is a thing that exists and is socially constructed. As a result, I think it ends just as it’s getting interesting, but I admit that the next things would have been extremely difficult and possibly an entirely different book.

If the description at the Tiptree Award website sounds interesting to you, and the voice is not offputting, I do recommend checking it out.

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