I would have liked to have enjoyed this book but, try as I might, I just couldn't manage it.
Perhaps I'm wrong and there are people out there eager for an experimental work that combines the traditions of Japanese kabuki and shinto with those of the North American Anishinaabe people. One critic has already said Vizenor is doing for Native Americans what James Joyce did for the Irish. So, who knows? Maybe we have a masterpiece comparable to Ulysses on our hands.
Unfortunately, it's hard to think so. I struggled with this novel, if novel it is. Maybe I failed to understand it, missed its essential point, or was simply blinded by the lightning flash of the new. But I don't believe that many readers will fare very much better.
I wish I could tell you what the book is all about. A few things are clear. Among people and things making an appearance are a dog called Curry, the 19th century Greek-born writer and
Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn (and the Japanese city he settled in, Matsue), the American Faubion Bowers (said to have "saved" kabuki during the post-World War II occupation), pachinko, Roy Orbison, Mahalia Jackson, Herbert Bix's relatively recent book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, the building of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel in 1922, the Yasukuni Shrine, the Meiji Restoration, Anishinaabe tricksters, shinto, the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the 17th century Japanese poet Basho, Tokyo's imperial ravens, sushi, the novelist Yukio Mishima, Alain Renais' 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, chrysanthemums, leprosy, cats and Yankee Doodle. Surely with all these things, you'd think, this ought to be a fascinating book. But it isn't. Sad to say, it lacks bounce, it lacks life.
Try it. You'll certainly hit on many a clear and even enjoyable passage, but you'll also be perplexed, confused, and finally irritated by the absence of any willingness to tell a story.
Is there a plot? Apparently there is, though I found it impossible to unravel it unaided. The author will no doubt claim that it's there for all to see, and quote sentences to prove it. Nevertheless, such sentences are separated by other material such as, for example, direct quotes from other books (lots of these). Clearly someone is hanging out in the Hiroshima Peace Park musing on the horrors and paradoxes of nuclear weapons. But in all probability you'll have to resort to the summary on the dust cover, as I did, to find the key to the story.
There we read that the main character, Roni, is the orphan son of an Anishinaabe man who acted as interpreter for General MacArthur after 1945, and a Japanese boogie dancer from the same period. I swear that I couldn't perceive this from the text itself. And the fact that a reviewer dutifully struggling to understand a book wasn't able to follow the plot doesn't hold out much hope for readers free to fling the book to one side as simply not worth the effort.
To call this a " kabuki novel," as the blurb does, must lead you to expect both the non-realistic and the unexpected. And it is clear that the voices of a variety of ghosts -- of those killed by the Hiroshima bomb, and perhaps others as well -- intersperse such narrative as there is. But kabuki gives pleasure, and I'm sorry to say that this novel doesn't.
This is not to condemn all experimental writing. But the best things in that idiom, though hard to understand initially, gradually become clear as you get onto their wavelength. I never got onto the wavelength of Hiroshima Bugi, if indeed it has one (rather than, as I believe, many).
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