The final reunion is a poignant one. Takeo is victorious, but now with a mutilated hand; Kaede is still apparently as beautiful as ever after a final confrontation with Kotaru, one of Shigeru's murderers, but is now hairless. As Takeo places his damaged hand over the scars covering her head, we are reminded that, legendary heroes though they might be, their physical vulnerability has proved to be something they can't entirely rise above.
In her appropriately taut narrative style, Lian Hearn displays what musicians call "perfect pitch," i.e. the ability to hit an exact note out of the blue. She portrays the three books' cast of characters, whether they're youthful warriors or avaricious despots, with equally deft brush-strokes. She employs the same sleight of hand to depict landscape details for dramatic effect -- the cry of the legendary houhou bird, said to be a harbinger of peace and justice, or the mournful howling of a dog after its owner has been executed. Horses receive the most loving attention of all -- their hoofbeats resound throughout the narrative, and they are even at times given equal standing to the human characters. Raku, for instance, a white horse with black mane and tail, and Takeo's gift to Kaede, is a talented animal that swims across a swollen river as calmly as if it were the sort of thing he did every day. Takeo's sword, Jato, is also given a degree of animation, again in true epic style -- consider the role of potent horses and swords in Richard Wagner's Ring operas, similarly set in legendary times.
Because these three books that make up the Tales of the Otori concern themselves with mythology, it's perhaps surprising that their author shows little interest in diving into the ocean of the Jungian collective unconscious and tapping into archetypal patterns that purportedly recur throughout humanity's imaginative history. But even without this meta-psycho-logical dimension, there remains a strong sense of the main characters -- Takeo, Kaede, Kenji and Jo-An -- being powerless to change their fates. As Jo-An tells Takeo: "Your life is not your own to determine; it belongs to God." This seems to imply a religious underpinning to the books that's nowhere more explicitly spelt out.
Across the Nightingale Floor and Grass for his Pillow, the two preceding volumes in the series that this book brings to a close, were reviewed in Taipei Times on Dec. 8, 2002 and Dec. 18, 2005 respectively. The unusually high quality of the trilogy as a whole is confirmed by this fine last volume, and having assigned the books an unusual amount of space feels, in the event, entirely justified.
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