This is the final and momentous volume of Tales of the Otori, one of the best mythic/historical stories set in Asia (in this case Japan) to have appeared in recent years.
At the start, the two main prota-gonists, Lord Otori Takeo and Lady Shirakawa Kaede, both have urgent tasks in front of them. Takeo supposedly has to avenge the murder of his former guardian, Shigeru, by despatching the warlords responsible. Kaede, meanwhile, must find a safe home for Shigeru's records of the Tribe which contain, amongst other things, the names of those responsible for Shigeru's murder and confirmation of Takeo's true lineage as Shigeru's rightful heir, and hence leader of the Otori clan. These ancient imperatives of mythic fiction are beautifully reincarnated by Lian Hearn.
Both Takeo and Kaede, in addition, face near-impossible quests. Takeo's is to fend off attacks from bandits, brigands, and warlords of every kind, Kaede's to bypass advances from rival suitors, most notably from Lord Fujiwara (who in an earlier volume took an interest in her prior to her wedding to Takeo). A cold-hearted collector of trophies, he turns out to be a stubborn opponent. It's small wonder, then, that Takeo clings to prophecies that seem to assure his eventual success.
While Takeo has plenty of enemies, he also commands loyalty from some significant friends. First among these is Makoto, a monk with homosexual inclinations, and Jo-An, an outcast with eyes that burn with a religious hunger. Because Jo-An has the knack of appearing at the exact moment his services are needed, he finds himself greeted with the hostility that tends to attach itself to all out-siders and oddballs. And though Takeo's followers are bemused by his use of people who they've been conditioned to despise, their flawed understanding is nonetheless shown to come from their ignorance of Takeo's own multi-stranded origins. In addition to Otori and Kikuta, his mother was a member of the Hidden, a millen-arian-sounding sect that eschews military combat, recognizes no hierarchy and instead believes everyone is equal before God. As a result it is, of course, universally despised.
The theme of the crucial power of outsiders is continued by Hearn when Takeo's small army has to navigate a river in full flood to avoid hostile forces, and it's the outcasts who build a floating bridge to provide them with a safe crossing. They receive scant gratitude. Faced with contempt from everyone, including the monks, the outcasts are shown as inexplicably puzzled by the lack of kindness, or even courtesy, shown them by the regular world; you'd have thought they'd have been used to it by then.
Military strategy preoccupies both the author and Takeo and Kaede, and indeed the lovers' paths are destined once again to diverge. Despite being fortified by a promise from a blind prophetess about his ultimate victory and, prior to that, almost complete safety, Takeo nonetheless has to face further battles before he can rest. These involve a bid to align himself with the warlord Arai Daiichi, the intervention of his former mentor, Muto Kenji (now desolate after the Tribe's murder of his daughter, Yuki) and, in a moment of pure magic realism, an encounter with a granite-boned giant.
Meanwhile, with no comparable assurances for herself, Kaede is fated to fall into Lord Fujiwara's grasp. Pretending to believe that he and Kaede are already betrothed, he declares her previous marriage invalid and offers to save her from execution by marrying her himself. In a climactic fire following an earthquake, Fujiwara, dying and paralyzed, clings to Kaede's ankle crying "If we are to die, let us die together!" until the flames start to consume her hair, a symbol of her outward perfection.
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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