Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori, #1) by Lian Hearn

Nov 05, 2012 Nicholas Armstrong rated it 1 of 5 stars

Okay. I'll try to be as kind and heartfelt as possible. This book is insultingly bad. Normally a bad book is just that, but this book is actually infuriatingly bad.

Firstly, it's a fantasy book set in feudal Japan. That's fine. I would think that it being set in Japan, Hearn would have learned anything about the place, but she apparently did not. This book is written as if Hearn simply googled Japan and then decided to write a book on it. I'll go down the list of failings.

Religion Japan wasn't Ch...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the u in honor

Recommended to Mariel by: chinatown

I was protesting the Chinese food place down the block today. It's ridiculous. None of their offered cuisine is truly Chinese. If I want to eat American I'll go to Pizza Hut, thank you very much. If that wasn't bad enough I later had lunch at the restaurant next door. They had these little cookies. If you break open the cookies there's a piece of paper that pops out with a message of something that might happen to you. This time I didn't eat the paper first and read what it said. "The Tales of t...more I was protesting the Chinese food place down the block today. It's ridiculous. None of their offered cuisine is truly Chinese. If I want to eat American I'll go to Pizza Hut, thank you very much. If that wasn't bad enough I later had lunch at the restaurant next door. They had these little cookies. If you break open the cookies there's a piece of paper that pops out with a message of something that might happen to you. This time I didn't eat the paper first and read what it said. "The Tales of the Otori books are set in an imaginary country in a feudal period. Neither the setting nor the period is intended to correspond to any true historical era, though echoes of many Japanese customs and traditions will be found, and the landscape and seasons are those of Japan...."

Alternate reality and borrowing from life isn't anything new. Judging by other goodreads reviews it seemed to bug some readers quite a bit. One time I watched Darren Aronsky's The Fountain with an ex (a Spaniard) and he snottily asked me if I knew that none of the historical Spanish scenes really happened (I'll remember this when I've forgotten his name). C'mon, alternate history isn't new! I'm sorry, I can't focus on Star Wars because Yoda looks familiar. Where have I seen him before (this is going to bug me)? So, warning in fortune cookie book, I can handle it. If you don't overlap then you are living alone. Originality is valuable for the extra mile we can't walk alone.

There's a bug infestation. Let me get that... Oops. I think I just changed history when I squashed that bug. It turns out that Tom Cruise was not the very last samurai after all. What harm could that have done? I'm sure it's all right.
This is a fantasy novel from 2002. If it came out a little later it would have been published as a young adult novel (market trends and all that). There could be warnings about the odds of young adult fantasy novels being about a young hero who magically has all of the powers he's going to need inside of him? More annoyingly (to me), he also has all of the self righteous fuel he's going to need. One dead mama, coming up. Hey, I met these hot guys and they just gave me all my ideologies. Neat! I don't care if that '80s ya book ripped off the one child policy from China, if George Lucas liked Japanese films. Everything else with WWII. You can make a better dish out of the same recipe your grandma always used. But the odds are so very high it will taste much the same and I've had this meal before. I'm a little tired of it. I spit out honor. Where's the personal touch? The you that doesn't remind me of someone else (honor tastes like chicken). The other person in the same memory. What would you do today if you spent today alone? Set your story in any place you like. Please let me recognize your character from someone else.

Across the Nightingale Floor is good when young Takeo interacts with people he meets, be it villagers or the lords he fears or respects, as if he's feeling out how to behave. Unfortunately, the first person leaves a lot of time for rhetoric as well as doing. The relationships he doesn't know how to already play as if he were Good Will Hunting in front of a chalk board staring down a hard math problem are good. Just live, don't think about the end game of power, please. Then the honor! Groans.

People are kinda the same and different. Why can't worlds and lands be the same way? Kinda different and kinda the same. It's when you can't work with what you've got that I have a problem. Like if it is already finished (duh, the easy magic!). How about something alternative?

Step on another bug (sorry, bugs. I swear that I try not to kill bugs). Change the course again. You can do it if you're writing your own story. Kaede, the female lead and different perspective was pretty good. Maybe doesn't step far enough out of kinda the same stories of female quasi leads in hero quest fantasies (you know, I'm a woman. I have to get married, I love that guy, I want to marry for love). She has potential to offer a life that's not handed on borrowed fine china because it's not magical egotism. At least she wanted someone to trust and the end result wasn't defeating something.

There are two more books in the series. I'm probably not going to read them. Not unless I am hungry and don't know what else to read. The odds are better that I'll find something I couldn't have found on my own in someone else's day.

P.s. Hearn should have kept her real name. Rubenstein! How about taking Lafcadio (where the Hearn comes from)? Lafcadio Rubenstein! Pen names are mightier than swords. That's not my fault. I became lame when I changed history.(less)

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Apr 13, 2011 Colleen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: library-read, romantic, historical-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, group-read

1 1/2

In my review for Graceling I stated that I was a bit of a sucker for romance elements in action type stories. I have, in the past, admitted to, probably, over-rating certain books because the romance element gave me the warm-squishies, even though other aspects of the book were lacking or, at times, downright annoying. (See 'Fire Study'.)

So it's a bit ironic that, for this book, I think the romance element between the two protagonists was the weakest aspect of the book. It was so eye-rollin...more

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Aug 23, 2011 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: young-adult, mainstream

Japanese author and Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata is famous for his ‘palm of the hand’ stories, stories so small and taciturn that they could fit in the grasp of one’s curled fingers. These stories comprise mere moments: a meeting of gazes, a gesture, a brief downfall of rain, the arranging of flowers, the steeping of tea. They are like wells: despite having a small, hemmed in surface of finite dimensions, their depths are unknown, dark, requiring close examination, speculation on behalf of t...more

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Dec 11, 2008 Stephanie rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, fantasy

This book is nothing other than a flight-of-fancy on the part of the author. The main character, Takeo, is virtually without flaw, which makes for an uninteresting protagonist and a predictable story. The female protagonist, Kaede, had slightly more promise that never managed to materialise, leaving her as a two-dimensional love interest for Takeo.

I enjoy trashy fantasy, but this novel was just so predictable and so mundane that I couldn't get into it. It has nothing new to offer, and doesn't do...more

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May 06, 2013 Lila rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audio-book

UPDATE 05/06/2013: Upon revisiting this review (see comments below), one thing stood out in an embarrassing way for me. Passing my judgements on readers who enjoy this book by questioning their general reading tastes was uncalled for, should never have happened and besides feeling rightly ashamed that I was the author of it, I'm quite dumbstruck that bringing another human being into my review and projecting onto her/him my views, emotions and feelings about a text I read had happened at all and...more

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Dec 31, 2012 StoryTellerShannon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-scifi

This is actually a fantasy novel, but, for marketing purposes it's being sold as fiction. Perhaps it's because the magical elements in this tale are very light and it focuses more on a Japan that never existed.

Focus is on two character viewpoints only: a teenage boy in first person and a teenage girl in third person. The mix works and it's one of the first times I've seen such a viewpoint mix, though, I'm sure this author isn't the first to do it.

The boy, Tomasau/Taeko, hops around with differ...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Kat Hooper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: audiobook

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

This is an excellent book -- beautiful, concise writing style, good characterization, fast pace, interesting plot. I didn't think I'd like the unusual fantasy setting, but I really did and I plan to read the rest of the series.

Warning about the audiobook: I listened to this book on CD. There are two readers--a man for the voice of Takeo, and a woman for the voice of Kaede. The man is an excellent reader with a lovely voice (he's got the oriental speech sou...more

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Feb 09, 2008 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, japan

This is a weird book for anyone who has more than a passing knowledge of Japan.

The author is a great fan of Japan, its culture and its history. That's obvious just by looking at her name, Lian Hearn, which is a pseudonym. According to Wikipedia, it's a contraction of "heron," an important bird in the Tales of the Otori series, but it's also the surname of one of the most famous Western experts on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn. She's gone to great lengths to instill Japanese culture into every part of th...more This is a weird book for anyone who has more than a passing knowledge of Japan.

The author is a great fan of Japan, its culture and its history. That's obvious just by looking at her name, Lian Hearn, which is a pseudonym. According to Wikipedia, it's a contraction of "heron," an important bird in the Tales of the Otori series, but it's also the surname of one of the most famous Western experts on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn. She's gone to great lengths to instill Japanese culture into every part of this book, from the names of people and places to social and political customs, even clothing and holidays. For all intents and purposes, this is a story about feudal Japan.

Except it isn't.

The Tales of the Otori takes place in a kind of alternate-universe Japan, a place where everything is the same except where it isn't. Once you get past that, the book becomes a lot of fun to read. And if you don't know much about the history and culture of Japan, that all shouldn't be a problem.

It's the story of a boy from an isolated town, one of the Hidden - a small religious sect that faces political and religious ostracism (see Christians in the Edo Period) from an isolationist and power-hungry warlord (see Tokugawa Ieyasu). Young Tomasu is the only survivor of a raid by that warlord - his family, his friend and his people were burned to the ground and he only lived thanks to the appearance of the Lord of the Otori, Shigeru.

Wracked with guilt over the death of his brother, Shigeru took Tomasu in as his son, renaming him Takeo. The boy found himself in a new land, with a new home... but that wasn't quite all. He soon discovered that he had a secret birthright, passed down through his father. Takeo was a member of The Tribe, a mysterious clan of spies and assassins who possessed near-mystical powers. They could move silently across nearly any floor, they could become invisible, or appear to be in two places at once. They were masters of the shadow and deliverers of death.

See Ninja.

It's a neat story, and the beginning of a series of books which are the author's first major foray into adult-ish fiction. It probably qualifies as Young Adult fiction, so if you're into that (as I know some of you are), it'll be a good read.

Thanks to Mom for sending me this....(less)

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Jan 06, 2011 Belinda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: action, fantasy, favourites, romance, reviews, ya

Note: In this review, there may be some spoilers, depending on your opinion of a spoiler. But there's nothing big, which is why I'm not hiding this review.

At first I really really really liked this book. Okay, that was slightly exaggerated. But, yeah, I really liked the book especially the premise of it. I don't know why, but I think the word "assassin" sounds intriguing, as well as a floor that squeaks at the slightest pressure.
True, the fact that the main character, Takeo, had special abilitie...more

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Dec 29, 2010 Janina rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, on-my-shelf, romance, read-in-2010, alternating-pov, series-lost-interest

Great epic/pseudo-historical fantasy with an amazing setting reminiscent of medieval Japan. This first installment of the Tales of thr Otori managed something epic fantasy rarely does for me: it captured me from the very first page.

When you take a look at the plotline, Across the Nightingale Floor has all the ingredients of an average epic fantasy: We have the orphaned hero, who is rescued by a noble stranger and discovers he has special abilities. We have the heroine, who is a pawn in her fath...more

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Mar 09, 2010 Bert Edens rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Being a fan of Japanese culture and history, as well as one of alternate history, I figured this was right down my alley. And it was. I really enjoyed the way it tied into Japanese culture, even though Hearn obviously took liberties with things she wanted to be different from reality. But hey, she is very clear that this is not set in Japan.

I really felt like Takeo could be better developed, and in the future Tales Of The Otori novels, he is. However, it's still not to the extent I would like to...more

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Jan 03, 2009 Anggia Retno rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, japanese, translated, own, favorites

A beautiful story...
Dimana takeo bertemu dengan lord otori (shigeru), diangkat anak dan bagaimana takeo yang ternyata merupakan keturunan kikuta memiliki kemampuan untuk membalaskan dendam lord otori shigeru dengan membunuh lord iida... Ceritanya bagus menarik banget, dulu sampai ga sabar nunggu buku keduanya,, takeo jadi kayak kebagi antara dia seorang bangsawan pewaris shigeru dan seorang kikuta. Dan takeo jatuh cinta sama kaede gadis bangsawan yang cantik banget yang dijodohin sama lord shige...more

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Nov 10, 2012 April rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: ya, own, fantasy, multicultural

One day, our main man, Takeo is just chilling out in the woods. He comes back to the biggest bummer ever, his whole village being massacred. Takeo then becomes lucky enough to piss off the culprit behind the massacre, but luckily he has a friend in Lord Otori Shigeru. Across The Nightingale Floor is a wonderful novel set in feudal Japan and deals with themes of honor, descision making, and identity.
Read the rest of my review here

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Apr 11, 2013 Lyn Farquhar rated it 4 of 5 stars

This story is the first of four books in this series called the Tales of the Otori. There is a 5th book that is a prequel. Across the Nightingale Floor begins in a remote mountain village in a fictional Japan of ancient legend with a boy named Takeo who is rescued from a brutal killing spree. Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Three Countries is engaged in killing the adherents of a religion called the Hidden. The story follows Takeo's life under the protection of Otori Shigeru, a potential rival...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Isaías rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Cualquiera, en serio.

Lo mejor que he leído últimamente.

Es como leer anime.

El escritor hizo un trabajo excelente al escribir utilizando dos narradores, uno en tercera y otro en primera persona. Supo combinar los dos muy bien, el libro te lleva de la mano durante toda la historia para que te imagines la belleza de los paisajes, los únicos personajes, lo terrible de la guerra y la muerte, la importancia del honor y el deber, y la belleza del amor.

Me pareció excelente porque durante todo el libro hubo intriga, revueltas...more

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Jan 23, 2013 Travis rated it 4 of 5 stars

The book "Across the Nightingale Floor" written by Lian Hearn tells the story of a young boy named Tomaso. at first he lives in a small peaceful village in the mountains called mino he was born into a tribe called the hidden who belived in an all powerful god that you could not see. one day Tomasu was running out in the forest playing, when he realized that it was time to go back to his village he starts back. Realizing that it was very quiet and he could not hear the normal sound of his village...more

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Dec 30, 2012 duniamimpigie duniamimpigie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: romance, terjemahan, filosofis

Si Gie bisa kelar baca jilid satuna pas di rumah, nonstop. Ini bisa berarti alur ceritana cukup rapi dan gampang diikuti.

Hmm... banyak typos yang bikin risi (ato sebenerna ENGGAK BANYAK, tapi karena si Gie makin eer.. sensitif sama typo, jadi terasa banyak :p )
Beberapa penempatan kata juga kurang tepat, yang berimbas menghambat pembaca.
Susunan kalimatna masi bisa dibuat jauuuuuuuuuh lebi cantik nyastra dengan diksi yang tepat (yang sayangna enggak terasa sepanjang novel ini)
Istilah-istilah Jepa...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Lucy rated it 4 of 5 stars

I gave this book a 4 because so many aspects of it were good. There were points, earlier on, where i thought it may be a 5 for me. But the ending disappointed me a lot. There was one other aspect of the plot, a little earlier, which also disappointed me.

What I liked:

-the world is amazing. I liked the whole japan/ninjas/samurai thing; I have not seen this done before and it was done well.

-the solid cast of characters. There were actually quite a lot of characters, with distinctive personalities....more I gave this book a 4 because so many aspects of it were good. There were points, earlier on, where i thought it may be a 5 for me. But the ending disappointed me a lot. There was one other aspect of the plot, a little earlier, which also disappointed me.

What I liked:

-the world is amazing. I liked the whole japan/ninjas/samurai thing; I have not seen this done before and it was done well.

-the solid cast of characters. There were actually quite a lot of characters, with distinctive personalities. I loved Shizuka and Shigeru. There were no antagonists who were particularly fascinating but they were believable and I certainly hated them.

-related to the point above, this story made me care. A lot.

(view spoiler)[
-for instance when the poor Hidden were sitting in the cages, I thought "He must put them out of their misery. I will be pissed off and quite possibly hate him if he does nothing". And Takeo does.

-When the needle first came up, I thought, "Kaede must kill the baron, it simply will not be as satisfying if someone else does". And she did. The foreshadowing was good. The evil Tohan have such a catalogue of crimes that I hated them and wanted them to die.

What I didn't like:

-As I mentioned above, the plot.

-As far as I'm concerned, the Tribes (Tribe?) are scum and deserve to die. Obviously not the more sympathetic members we meet like Yuki and Shizuka.

-The oath. Why exactly would he feel bound by this? The story redeemed itself by the monk pretty much covering this (oath under duress not valid; he has other obligations; they have already broken faith; the help in the assassination doesn't redeem them for me as a reader, particularly if they are willing to kill him and killed his father).

-If the story had dealt with this, with it being obliquely implied that Takeo plans 1. go along with the tribes and learn enough to be able to kill them 2. go do his thing with kaede and the Otori and basically kill anyone of the Tribe who try to interfere... If this had happened I would have been happy.

-Instead I get Takeo feeling a vague sense of identification/sympathy for these assassin scum, a slightly homoerotic scene with a monk (what about kaede?), although I like said monk since he voices some of my objections, and Takeo possibly outright hurting Kaede and ditching her. After she begged him to marry her and slept with him -- which means a lot in their society. Not cool.

Anyway, I do realise this is part of a series, but I just would have liked to see some clear resolution from Takeo instead of "I have this oath to these people who are treacherous dogs. Ok, I would actually break this oath now that you mention it, but they would kill me. All is hopeless." Something more like "I plan to eventually be able to kill them if they try to do me in."

If the series continues more like the latter, and less like the former, maybe I would try it, but I am fairly dissatisfied, and I doubt the tribe could do anythign to redeem themselves for me if the series takes that route. (kenji helping with the assassination? Nope, still hate him)

Oh! One more thing. It annoyed me that Takeo got to take the credit for the killing. I think her deadly reputation is great, it would definitely help her in ruling her province.

(hide spoiler)](less)

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Nov 05, 2012 Paula rated it 1 of 5 stars

I call Twilight on this one.

Man, you can waste so many cool things just by adding magic into the story. It removes any sense of struggle, any effort on the part of the characters.

Also, destiny is a dark and sometimes tragic thing, losing control over your own life - not just a way to get everything from life without having to earn it!

The characters are flat, the language simplistic, the description basic and lackluster, the cultural coloring nothing beyond popculture crap, the plot contrived, t...more

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Aug 29, 2012 Ela rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Ela by: Anna

Shelves: ya-realistic-fiction, historical, series

I loved the writing, story and the society, which was very well constructed.
However I didn't really like the characters. While they were convincing I remained completely unattched to them throughout. I found them cold and melodramatic. I Particularly disliked the main characters and the romance between them. The hero was irratating and hypocritical. One moment he was criticising brothels and how the girls were forced into them, the next minute, he was in one. One moment he was declaring his undy...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Meg Jayanth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: awesome-protagonist, epic-worldbuilding, fantasy, first-person, kick-ass-women, magic, japan

A lovely start to a fantasy series set in a kind of alternate feudal Japan - Lian Hearn manages to make her setting and characters evocative and complex without exoticising them. Your mileage may vary, of course, but just for perspective I found Memoirs of a Geisha absolutely unreadable in this regard.

Across the Nightingale Floor is clearly a well-researched and detailed take on some of the cultural and social ideas of that time - women's roles, honour, inter-clan struggles, duty and loyalty, a...more A lovely start to a fantasy series set in a kind of alternate feudal Japan - Lian Hearn manages to make her setting and characters evocative and complex without exoticising them. Your mileage may vary, of course, but just for perspective I found Memoirs of a Geisha absolutely unreadable in this regard.

Across the Nightingale Floor is clearly a well-researched and detailed take on some of the cultural and social ideas of that time - women's roles, honour, inter-clan struggles, duty and loyalty, and the more universal idea of trying to keep your own personal morality in this dangerous and shifting world. Though the book is told from the alternating perspectives of Takeo and Kaede, it's fairly clear that this is Takeo's book - his sections are in first-person, he is a catalyst for much of the action. (However, Kaede's first few chapters are excellent - and she really comes in to her own in the sequel, Grass For His Pillow.) While it's quite political, it's not just a "courtly" book - there is a fair amount of dramatic action, and a dose of magic which manages not to feel out of place. In fact, there's a strangely magical feeling to the entire narrative, lazily mythic, which helps it through certain aspects that normally I would find difficult.

For instance, Takeo & Kaede fall madly, scorchingly in love at first sight - so suddenly and painfully that it feels almost like an enchantment, a sickness. Though I'm not a fan of this sort of development, it works in context - in this respect, Takeo & Kaede feel almost like exemplary figures, rather than psychologically nuanced "characters" necessarily. Though Hearn can clearly do a more subtle romance - Shigeru and Lady Murayama are the real starts of this first book.

One caveat, however: Hearn seems unable to stop talking about Kaede's beauty in terms of its fragility. She is often sick, and delirious - her emotional responses play out in terms of physical ailments, all of which only make her more madly desirable to the men around her. As she loses weight, and her bones show, and her misery increases, her beauty deepens. I find this troubling. There is an element, I think, of Hearn being wise to the problems of this - to her credit, Kaede herself never thinks in this way. She practically considers her beauty a weapon, one of the very few that women are allowed in the claustrophobic world she inhabits. She sees the unseeing desire of men as a desire to posess, this is clearly articulated - but there is still an unsettling enjoyment of describing Kaede's sickness, her fraility, her ethereal beauty that comes from unhappiness and illness and thinness.(less)

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Aug 11, 2012 Katie rated it 3 of 5 stars

A fantastical re-imagining of feudal era Japan. The plot is a bit thin and there isn't much in the way of character development, especially for Kaede the female protagonist.
The story revolves around Takeo, a young man rescued by a lord from the massacre at his village. He is scooped up from rural mountain life and brought to a Lord's mansion and trained to be an assassin. In the course of a year he goes from illiterate unskilled child to a competent budding ninja-warrior-young man.
Kaede is a ho...more

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Aug 02, 2012 Juli Rahel rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this book probably 5 years ago and absolutely fell in love with it. I think it might be the main reason why I really want to go to Japan. A country that can inspire a story like this has to be brilliant. I therefore decided, yesterday at 5, to reread it. I was sucked straight back into the story and finished it the same evening, all 500 pages.

Lord Otori, Takeo, and Takeo's new teacher Kenji set off to meet Kaede, a fifteen-year-old girl chosen as the future Lady Otori by a group of polit...more I read this book probably 5 years ago and absolutely fell in love with it. I think it might be the main reason why I really want to go to Japan. A country that can inspire a story like this has to be brilliant. I therefore decided, yesterday at 5, to reread it. I was sucked straight back into the story and finished it the same evening, all 500 pages.

Lord Otori, Takeo, and Takeo's new teacher Kenji set off to meet Kaede, a fifteen-year-old girl chosen as the future Lady Otori by a group of political collaborators. Takeo is still trying to come to terms with knowing that, through the father he never knew, he is one of the Tribe--a group of mysterious, ninja-like assassins who have allegiance to no one. When Takeo and Kaede first meet, they are drawn to each other, and without speaking a word, fall in love. But events are doomed to pull them apart, and soon they are each thrust into a battle for their lives.
This is a fascinating story. The author, Lian Hearn (a pseudonym for Gillian Rubinstein) , steeped herself with knowledge of the old Japan, samurais and the old feudal system and all of this comes out in a spectacular way. A flaw to historical fiction, which this novel is slightly, is often that there is more history than fiction and the plot gets lost in all the facts, making for a complicated read. In 'Across the Nightingale Floor' you get the feeling that you are accessing a world that gives you the possibility to learn so much, without forcing itself upon you. The knowledge is hidden away in sentences describing characters and their actions.

Hearn herself said she wanted to highlight 'silence', which is very important in Japanese culture, and her writing style is therefore 'spare, elliptical and suggestive'. Takeo remains silent for a time, allowing Hearn to, in a very innovating way, describe her surroundings and Japan in detail. His amazing hearing means we get a real insight into the sounds of Japan around that time without them having to be obtrusive.

The characters are very interesting. Especially those coming from the Tribe are very interesting since they often seem to battle with their loyalties and their incredible skills. The mystery surrounding them almost makes them an enemy, simply because the reader is not sure they can trust them. The same counts for most of the other characters. Because Hearn switches her narrative between Takeo Otori and Kaede Shirakawa we get to understand that no one seems to be who they are. In a society where honour and loyalty seem crucial on the outside, the danger of backstabbing betrayal is always around the corner. Kaede is probably my favourite character. She brings attention to the fact women were used as strategic chess pieces but not in a moany way. She is fully aware of her own importance and of how men see her and is not afraid to take advantage of this.

Although I am not a big fan of love-at-first-sight story lines, I really liked it between Kaede and Takeo. Their love does not only come out of desire but is, I think, also a reflection of their situation and of human nature. In the turbulence and political confusion surrounding them they recognize themselves in the other, the same need for something stable, something they can be sure off. Hearn is able to play with all the major themes of life: love, trust, honour, death, betrayal, desire and more, without becoming too moral or too philosophical.

The imagery in the novel is, as expected, beautiful. Japanese art and architecture is gorgeous and it is clear that Hearn fell in love with it as well. Takeo takes on the identity of an artist at times and this allows Hearn to linger on these details that are oh-so important for setting the scene and allowing a reader's fantasy to make the book his or her own. It also shows a great respect on Hearn's side for the Japanese culture in trying to incorporate as many of its elements as possible into her story.

This is a fascinating historical fiction, in which the fiction is not sacrificed to the history. The characters are intriguing and you are bound to feel for them. The imagery and plot line are breath-taking and the novel is bound to leave you wanting more. Thank God for the sequel.(less)

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Feb 23, 2012 Dave rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, fantasy

This was only mildly entertaining and very predictable. It is also first of three in a series and a genera that I had not read before, but I am not going to read the next volumes. This work is an attempt at historical Japanese fantasy. I think that the fantasy elements are worked into the story well. It is not as though the story depends on fantasy, like the movie Crouching Tiger, but it also does not have great depth of other elements. It is essentially a forbidden love story, but all of that i...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Scott Gillespie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: japan

Given the number reviewers who hated this book, I will begin with a caveat. I listened in audio format which was very enjoyable but I can see where some of the tedious elements (if reading) would be hard to take. However the audible version is performed in Takeo's voice as well as Kaide.

For those who refuse to see any of the wonders of Japan and Japanese culture in the book I can only encourage you to "get over yourself". I have met many who people who, having spent some time in Japan explode a...more

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Nov 17, 2011 Πέτρος rated it 3 of 5 stars

Notice: I have made a review for every book of this series and they need to be read in order since they are supposed to feel like an on-going impression. So if you read the second without reading the first will feel rather off.

I am mostly focusing on the style of storytelling and a lot less on if it reads well or something sophisticated like that. For the same reason I tend to have lots of SPOILERS which means that if you read this text you will know THE OVERALL PLOT and how much I DIDN’T like...more

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Aug 28, 2011 Katarina rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Apparently this book has been receiving lots of praise (and even some rewards!). I honestly can’t understand why. The plot is every clichéd fantasy book rolled into one with only the setting changed: a teenager from a small village in the middle of nowhere witnesses the villain attacking said village. All his loved ones are dead and his life changes forever when the mentor character saves him and tells him about his special heritage and destiny and all the cool powers he’s got. They go against t...more Apparently this book has been receiving lots of praise (and even some rewards!). I honestly can’t understand why. The plot is every clichéd fantasy book rolled into one with only the setting changed: a teenager from a small village in the middle of nowhere witnesses the villain attacking said village. All his loved ones are dead and his life changes forever when the mentor character saves him and tells him about his special heritage and destiny and all the cool powers he’s got. They go against the villain, and in the meanwhile the mentor dies and the hero falls in love with a beautiful damsel in distress and gains a fancy sword. Across the Nightingale Floor is all this, IN FEUDAL JAPAN!

Well, not really in feudal Japan, but close enough. The novel is set in a fantasy counterpart to Japan, but unlike the real thing, this setting feels incredibly shallow even to a person like me who knows nothing of Japanese history and has read exactly one other Japan-related book and therefore can't compare it to anything. The clans are meant to be ancient, with long and proud histories, but the farthest back we go is to the battle of Yaegahara, ten years prior to the events of the novel, when the villain won and everything changed. Apparently the heroes want everything back to the way it used to be, but the reader can’t quite feel for them because s/he doesn’t have a goddamned clue about how anything used to be. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any of the characters existing as anything but blank slates before the battle of Yaegahara, since all of them are so defined by their relationship with the villain and the wrongdoings he did to them. For all the mourning Otori Shigeru does for his father and brother, we never get any insight into what kind of people they were, or what kind of relationship he had with them. He’d spent his entire life with them before they died, and we never get a glimpse of that life or a hint about how it helped Shigeru evolve into the person he is now. They’re just convenient props created to give him a plausible motivation for hating the villain for what he did to them. Tomasu/Takeo seems to forget his mother and sisters relatively easily, too. The mother gets little characterization, and the sisters get none, so they feel less like real humans and more like props, too. The moment he gets adopted he just forgets about them completely, except when he’s talking about revenging their deaths. And I can’t buy how completely clueless he is regarding his father -- didn’t it ever occur to him to ask his mother about him? The rest of the side characters only exist to rebel against the villain or try to recruit Takeo into the Tribe. It’s as if the whole world sprang into existence in the moment right before the battle of Yaegahara, and nothing has got any history beyond that.

Considering that the novel gives lots of attention to what are meant to be the power plays of great warlords, the relevant characters are surprisingly isolated from the rest of said warlords. There are four or five families involved in the infighting, and none other are ever mentioned. There’s absolutely no suspense in this infighting either since we already know who’s on the heroes’ side, and calling it intrigue or politics is the overstatement of the year. There’s also talk of an emperor in the capital, and we’re supposed to believe that he’s just sitting idly doing nothing while one of his lords is taking away territory from everyone else and amassing enough power to oppose him. It also never occurred to any of the clans attacked by the Tohan to seek help from the emperor regarding what seems to be a very disobedient noble. Now, I know next to nothing about Japanese history, so maybe they wouldn’t do it from some historical or cultural reason that I don’t know of, but it just seems like critical lack of common sense to me. Even if there was a plausible reason for it, I felt that it could have been explained, since this is a fictional country we’re talking about and not real-life Japan. Another thing that the author doesn’t seem to notice is that setting up a class system like the medieval Japanese one and then giving one group magic powers seriously upsets the balance between the classes. I couldn’t help but wonder throughout the entire book why the Tribe hadn’t just taken over the country centuries ago. They’re more powerful than anyone, and with their special talents there’d be basically no way of overthrowing them. I don’t see how the class system could have turned out the way it did in the first place with the Tribe existing since the beginning, it seems to me that such a powerful group of people should naturally lead the others. Oh, and another thing I found odd with the Tribe concept: at one point the Tribe’s best assassin is well-known enough that most people think that he did some killing that was actually done by the main character, and before that everyone seems mostly familiar with the concept of the Tribe, if not their inner workings, but later in the book Arai, an aristocrat and a fairly powerful individual, has no idea who they are, and it’s implied that most people don’t. So do they or don’t they? And if powerful people like Arai have never heard of them, who the hell hires them?

The world is also odd because it’s mostly made up, and yet there are locations and artists that exist in real-world Japan, so the reader is never sure how much of the setting is real and how much is made up. It’s just confusing and it sort of butchered my willing suspension of disbelief while I was reading -- I mean, why couldn’t the author have given a couple of locations and a painter new names, too? She gave paper-thin disguises to everything else, so why not this? I found it just jarring. I don’t mind historical fantasy (I love Kay’s Lions of Al-Rassan and Sarantine Mosaic books to death), but I think you need to set up the rules first: it’s either historical fantasy or alternate history, and the reader ought to know exactly how much of the real world applies to the fantasy world. Also, it's not okay to call samurai and ninja by their names, so she has to use "warrior" and "assassin" all the time even when it doesn't fit, but referencing a real-life artist is a-okay. Nice continuity there.

The characters are flat, and that’s putting it lightly. The POV characters are completely devoid of any realistic emotion, especially Takeo, who seems to hop from personality change to personality change with no hints on why or how it happened in between. One moment he isn’t interested in learning how to write, the next moment he adores it. He spends the whole book being too “soft” and repulsed by killing to be a Tribe member, then suddenly the repulsion is gone when he needs it gone, without any previous hint that it might happen. Kaede is only marginally better. She’s obviously being set up as the love interest from the start, but the way in which she falls in love with Takeo is laughable. That scene just took all the credulity the book had left and shot it in the head, point-blank. And trust me, it was a mercy kill. Iida is the typical pointlessly cruel villain corrupted by his own power. We don’t get any depth from the rest of the cast, either. Why is Captain Arai rebelling? Why is Lady Maruyama doing the same, aside from being in love with Shigeru? Why is Iida trying to conquer all this territory? What does he have against the Hidden? It’s plausible that the POV characters don’t know the answers to some of these questions, but real, three-dimensional people would at least have a theory. When the most logical motivation in the book comes from a pair of stereotypical evil uncles trying to kill their nephew because he’s got a better claim to the family lands, you know what sort of book you’re reading. However, I do have to acknowledge that there are some nice details that show us the sort of culture these characters have grown up in -- Takeo not only thinks of the pain that Shigeru is suffering being hung from the wall of Iida’s castle, but also of the humiliation of being treated as a common criminal. After Kaede’s marriage with Shigeru falls through, she’s worried about bringing shame to her family more than anything else, and she’s considering suicide as the most honourable option she’s got. These are all nice and refreshing touches since most fantasy authors seem to find it hard to shake off the twenty-first century westerner mentality when writing their characters. But then, of course, we get Kaede launching into endless talk of “oh, why have men made such a cruel world?” and it just goes back to standard bad fantasy.

There’s some really gratuitous violence throughout the book, which I usually don’t mind at all, but here it was obvious that the author included it to make the book “edgy” and “realistically medieval” when it wasn’t, so it just left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s all performed by the villain and his henchmen, of course, and all the heroes are rightly horrified upon seeing it. The Hidden (a clear analogy for Christians) are pacifists to a ridiculous level, and then there’s a scene in which, IIRC, Shigeru is horrified because Iida’s army is raiding the villages. It’s a medieval army setting off to conquer more territory. How do you expect Iida to feed them? Some sympathetic characters die in the end, yeah, but I couldn’t bring myself to care because none of them had any personality in the first place. The hero and his love interest survive, of course. The villain is killed in a ridiculously anti-climactic way, and not even by the hero, which was pretty much the only true surprise in the entire book. The titular nightingale floor barely appears.

The prose manages to be too terse and too slow at the same time. It’s concise and to-the-point, but it fails to pack an emotional punch or give a sense of urgency. Most of it seems to be the POV character retelling what he did in short summaries instead of the reader actually witnessing what’s going on, so we skip most of Takeo’s training (seriously, in one chapter he’s beginning his training and in the next one with his POV he can already project himself out of his own body and turn invisible) and on the characters developing relationships with each other. This makes it all fall a bit flat, since we’ve never been there to witness it firsthand, we’ve just been told about it in an offhand sentence, and even exciting action scenes seem a bit droll. The author always describes the setting in a good, non-intrusive way, though, so we always know what time of the year it is and what the local plantlife is like and what’s the weather like on that particular day. This was nice to read and really gave me a feel of the place.

Basically, this book is short, boring, uneventful and utterly flat and unrealistic, and I don’t recall reading anything worse in a long, long time. No characterization, no worldbuilding, no action, no anything. One star.

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Jun 09, 2011 Mystique rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: peeps interested in Japan, or traditional cultural myths of Japan, fuedal Japan

Bloody awesome 1st book of the series.
I was feeling restless at work (library), having caught up on all my usual authors, I wanted to try something new and fresh, so hopped over to the sci-fi/fantasy section and came across this on the shelves by chance.

After seeing that it was another foreigner take on feudal/traditional Japan, I was weary but with an element of actual fantasy (and ninjas, how can we say no to ninjas) I took the entire series out and safe to say, this definitely did not disapp...more

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May 09, 2011 Cheeyee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, historical, fantasy, 2011

Review At: I Read, I Think,

I Share

Review Date: 26 Jan 2011

Review URL: http://littlemermybooks.blogspot.com/...
The story is told primarily in first-person narrative by Otori Takeo. At first, I thought I will get bored very quickly but on the contrary, the more I read the more I get fascinated. The characters are well developed and the story was alternate between Takeo and Kaede. Both of them have sad story but they did not give up getting what they want.

Japanese historical story always made me f...more

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Across the Nightingale Floor (Tales of the Otori #1)

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