Takeo, for instance, has a less than heroic time acquainting himself with the ways of The Tribe. Nicknamed "Dog" on account of his prodigious hearing, he has to learn to juggle, disguise his Otori appearance, and generally do the bidding of The Tribe, all under the eye of a mentor first encountered in Volume One. It isn't until halfway through the book that he comes to his senses and resolves to break with The Tribe and join forces with Kaede. Here most readers will breathe a sigh of relief.
Takeo is next reassured by a prophecy he receives from a blind woman, a member of The Hidden. "Your lands will stretch from sea to sea. Five battles will buy you peace, four to win and one to lose. Many must die, but you yourself are safe from death, except at the hands of your own son." Again, with its echoes of "One ring to find them all and in the darkness bind them" and so on, par for the fantasy-mythological course.
After assembling an army of farmers, outcasts and charcoal-burners, he is comforted by Makoto, someone he met shortly after Shigeru's death, who brings the news that Kaede is not only still alive but raising an army to claim the Maruyama territories for herself.
Takeo's heart swells in admiration. Makoto, a classic faithful-follower figure, becomes his traveling companion. They both find support from some monks at a local temple. They also promise to give him access to records kept by Shigeru outlining the treachery of his uncles that brought about his demise.
Kaede, meanwhile, manages first to quash Lord Arai's advances and then to cool the inconvenient ardor of Lord Fujiwara by asking him to instruct her in military matters. Takeo is alerted to trouble by the whinnying of his horse and is filled with a sense of urgency that he and Kaede must marry at the earliest opportunity, both to ward off further suitors' advances and to cement their military alliance.
"The world stood still in the silent night as the realization sunk in. The backs of my eyes stung as tears came. Heaven was benign, the gods loved me. They had given me Kaede."
Here the final ingredient of great stories, missing from Tolkien and so far from Harry Potter, is dutifully supplied. Lian Hearn has a spare, laser-sharp writing style that adds momentum to what is a strong and engaging tale. Because of her studies in Japanese life and letters, Hearn confers authenticity onto what might otherwise have been an unwieldy narrative.
Even so, it's important to point out that these kind of heroic tales reinforce the military ethic. Recent revelations that computer war-games, with which this story has something in common, are created with the cooperation of the military came, with retrospect, as no great surprise. As with the war-games, so with books like these. You get so used to the good slaying the evil to regain their rightful territories that the slaughter in Iraq comes to seem justifiable. We ought to have have passed beyond such fantasies, but they are proving strangely durable.
If you accept the premises of the genre, you'll enjoy this book is a superior example of it. If you don't, then Grass For His Pillow will appear, despite its many strengths, as inevitably flawed by its underlying military and brute-force assumptions.
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