The Grass-cutting Sword

by Catherynne M. Valente

A new novel by the author of The Labyrinth and Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword explores the strange landscape of primeval Japan, from the Heaven-Spanning Bridge to the hellish Root-Country: the troubled trickster Susanoo-no-Mikoto, god of wind and storms, is banished from heaven and wanders the earth, lost in human form, in search of his demonic mother and charged with the defeat of an eight-headed serpent.

Genres: Fantasy, Mythology, Fiction, Poetry, Historical Fiction, Novella, Adult

126 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2006

About the author

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.

She currently lives in Maine with her partner, two dogs, and three cats, having drifted back to America and the mythic frontier of the Midwest.

Reviews

[Michael Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was a wild ride of a creation myth/novel. I must admit, my knowledge of Japanese mythology is limited to bits and pieces picked up from anime and manga, and nothing I knew could have prepared me for this.

It was so harsh and visceral, making the titans and gods of Greek Mythology seem rather vanilla in comparison. It really is beautiful in it's own way but not an easy read.

Undoubtedly thought provoking and I still wonder about the motivations of the eight sisters in particular. I wouldn't mind reading more, as this feels like only the beginning of the story. A wild beginning, to be sure, and I also wonder how many liberties were taken in the novelization.

A well written and unforgettable experience but not one you should read before dinner.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wouldn't hesitate to call Valente one of my favorite authors, but now I feel I have to add an "except..." here.

This story is set in two parts: an okay origin of the world myth and then pages and pages of simply grotesque descriptions that don't even make a whole lot of sense or really add that much to the story.

I'm not sure why the girls were so happy and willing to be eaten by some bizarre, gross, always bleeding, stalker snake monster.

Also not sure why Valente thought sentences like (describing her own birth) "...she pushed and pushed and I dribbled from her like pus, like a tumor, like a leech," were necessary or even good.

It was as if she just wanted to use every gross, unpleasant word she could as much as she could.

I know, and enjoy, the fact that Valente is an adjective heavy, kind of weird, kind of different, out there writer, but this story is too adjective heavy, too weird, too different, too out there.

Finally, this story, at 126 pages, was simply too long. I felt like I was trapped with someone who wouldn't stop bringing up a gross event I was trying to forget.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure, from the description, how much I would like this one. People warned of gore -- which, yes, there is here, mostly the gore of childbirth and creation -- but oddly that didn't bother me. It's poetic, like Yume No Hon, but less heavy with it, and with a plot that's both more important to the experience of the book and easier to follow. Valence echoes the structure of myth well, while bringing her own insight to it, her own images and preoccupations.

One review I read was confused that in the middle it becomes a creation story, telling the story of Izanagi and Izanami. That didn't seem necessary to them, but I think it depends on what you think is the heart of the story. If you're only interested in the girls and the monsters, perhaps you'll be impatient with the creation story, but I was fascinated by the whole world Valente evoked. I think I might even like it better than Palimpsest and Deathless -- and I liked those quite a lot.

[R.C. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. The amount of blood, gore, rape, torture, misogyny, and murder in this book was just...impressive. But it was also boring. The gore and horror (and this was a horror book more than mythology or fantasy, imho) were just kind of there. Everyone was comparing everything to bodily fluids, and there was enough description of fish eye soup to hold me my whole life. There was little plot, and half of the book was done in an interrupted pseudo-poetic style that was both incredibly difficult to follow but also incredibly repetitive, as it was telling the story of either sisters who all met the same fate. The prose part's protagonist was pretty completely without empathy or sympathetic qualities.

I can tell that this was supposed to be transgressive, to take mythology and emphasize the gory bits (the story of Izanami and Izanagi was just as terrible in the original myth, but less graphic), but this was just not my cup of tea.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

First off, this book is not for everyone. That being said, I kind of loved it. The more I'm thinking about it -- the experience of it, the story itself, the creation myth within/creating the story -- the more I'm loving it. It's a short little book, broken into sections, and it really oftentimes reads like really lush prose poetry, other times it's a kind of Japanese "just-so" story told from the point of view of the fallen storm-god-turned-mortal-man, hunting for a dragon/snake/beast who has eaten a poor farmer's 7 daughters, and captured the 8th. Then, other parts are from the point of view of this dragon/snake/monster with 7 heads (a head for each daughter), with one head telling their tale, interspersed with the dragon/snake/monster's thoughts because they are joined. So that sounds pretty crazy, and it is, pretty much, but it's just so ... I don't know, strange and beautiful and lush and poetic that it somehow works. Catherynne Valente is way cool.

[Darceylaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Valente continues in themes of devouring/being eaten, birth/death (that we find in Labyrinth) and the earth as broken, festering body (that we find in Yume No Hon. I believe (hope) this novella is the zenith of her obsession with bodily fluids.

I imagine it performed in multiple voices as an Avant-garde staged reading.

I did not enjoy a single page of this book. It has so little forward motion, it is so repetitive and has no mercy for the reader. It follows its formula joylessly. I stuck with it to the bitter end lest she somehow pull us out of the muck into some sort of redemption or mystic wisdom, but alas it is unredeemed.

Valente is a great talent and voice, one of my all time favorite authors. Please do not choose this as your introduction to her work.

[Omly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book took me forever to get through. It is really much more poetry than fiction, and I can't say that I am that into poetry... For a long time I was just slogging through it, because I really enjoyed a reading the author gave of one of her other books. In particular I found the parts from the perspective of the 8 headed dragon (and the sisters he ate) really hard to get though, though more because of the formatting than the gruesomeness. If nothing else, though, you have give the author the fact that she is really good at vivid.

[Anie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a novel, but I have to label it as poetry. This story, of 8 maidens, a serpent, and a fallen storm-god, is a beautiful prose-poem with enough twisting turns and threads to make it more than worth reading over and over in order to fully understand it. Absolutely beautiful, and definitely fun.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was beautiful, but the narrative was disappointing and unoriginal. Imo, there is nothing progressive about writing women oppressed and suffering and leaving it at that. I wasted my time reading this.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely the most powerful of the four early Valente novels contained in “Myths of Origin”. Bitterness and rage roil just beneath the surface, sometimes not even that far down. The book interleaves extremely unpleasant versions of two Shinto myths, the creation of the world and the finding of the titular sword (one of the three Imperial Regalia of Japan). The Shinto pantheon is depicted as dysfunctional beyond even the usual standards of polytheistic pantheons. (There seem to be various transliterations of the divine names: I use Valente’s throughout.) Izanagi, the creator god, is a patriarchal monster who rapes and abuses Izanami, his female counterpart, and is concerned only about the children she can produce. When one of those children, the god of fire, kills (sort of: she’s still a goddess, after all) Izanami in childbirth, she, understandably embittered by this treatment, retreats to/creates/becomes the underworld, turning into the goddess of death. (This creates an unusual association of masculinity with fecundity and femininity with death, as Izanagi is depicted as now constantly creating gods in an attempt to demonstrate that Izanami wasn’t ever necessary.) Their daughter Ama-terasu, the goddess of the sun, is merely imperious and unpleasant: her brother Susanoo-no-Mikito, the god of storms and the sea, is selfish, willful, and violent, obsessed, for some reason, with the mother he has never met. Expelled from heaven by his sister after a rampage through her palace, he is incarnated in Japan as a human being and immediately asked by a peasant couple to rescue their eighth daughter from a monster that has already eaten the previous seven. The other strand of the plot allows each of those daughters to tell their stories, largely similar tales of being married off, one after the other, to the same man, and then being consumed by the monster, which they become a part of. Each speaks from, and with, one head of the monster, which weaves its commentary into the story of the girl it has consumed: each story strongly suggests that the girl is better off as part of the monster than otherwise. In fact, Valente suggests that the girls are needed to complete the monster in some fashion, and when Kushinada, the last daughter, is consumed, it finally becomes clear that the monster is in fact one of Izanagi and Izanami’s first children, Hiroku, regarded by Izanagi as an abomination but loved by his mother. (Incidentally, all of these are additions or changes to the original myth.) Nonetheless, Susanoo-no-Mikito, as he does in the original myth, gets the monster drunk — helped here by the fact that the monster hopes that this is a friendly greeting from a brother — and kills it, making the grass-cutting sword out of its spine. Kushinada is taken alive from the beast’s corpse, but her sisters are all dead, and we leave her naked, covered in blood, and crying over the beast’s corpse, her sanity in tatters. But this is not the final image of the book: that comes in the next chapter, in which Susanoo-no-Mikito buries his human form alive in the hopes of finally reaching his mother. To add to the general air of despair, Valente transposes the action to Hiroshima (the city was founded centuries after the myth was first written down) to allow her to make references to the atomic bombing, though this doesn’t really fit with the ugly, disgusting, and above all organic images of death that are otherwise common in the book. Still, the strongest emotional impact comes from the stories of the sisters, which are turned into archetypal tales of female oppression. The husband that all but Kushinada are married to is always described as being neither x nor its opposite (e.g. “neither tall nor short”), a characterless blank who therefore stands in for all men: in the final scene, Susanoo-no-Mikito, the nominal hero (whom we already know lacks the usual heroic virtues) is similarly described (he is “neither god nor man”), sliding him into the same position and strongly suggesting that no man can be trusted. Instead, it is the monster who offers the sisters their only hope of escape from a life that was not exactly wonderful even before they were offered up, one at a time, to a man about whom all they knew was that each preceding sister left with him and was never seen again. As in the previous books, Valente does some fancy tricks with her writing — the way the sisters’ words are interleaved with the monster’s, in particular — but since these gymnastics are now at the service of a much more forceful point, they work much better. And the images in the book are much more tightly tied to its emotions, enhancing the emotional weight. The resulting book is not always a pleasant read, but packs quite a punch.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peculiar and violent, but Valente is as lyrical as ever.

[Sue Chant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Japanese-type mythology - I found it over-written, descripions rather than story or character - everything was "like" something else.

[Fantasy Literature · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Grass-Cutting Sword is a metaphor, comprised almost entirely of exquisite imagery, and every single word has obviously been chosen with a poet’s eye for sound and sight. It is a creation myth and a Grendel for the nuclear age, a story of beginnings and endings, of beauty and hideousness. The images Catherynne M. Valente chooses in The Grass-Cutting Sword will haunt your nightmares and inform your dreams. Close your eyes, for instance, and envision the monster of the tale from this excerpt of its self-description:

I am Eight. We are Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso — circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the ... Read More:
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

[Patrick Hurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting bit, but a little overdone in others. The monster/devoured girl sections were not to my taste. Not because of the gore--that I actually found appropriate for the setting. They were difficult to follow, and more importantly, the enjoyment of reading them was not worth the challenge. There were no brilliant insights gained, no rich reward upon wading through their clamoring voices, just the vague sense of a writer trying too hard. I'm glad I checked this out of the library rather than buying it. I did, however, find the Storm God's section passable, and the creation myth, though shockingly brutal, was fascinating.

I've enjoyed the author's other works far more, but I do give her credit for trying something different and not being afraid to challenge readers.

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Weirdest. Dragon story. Ever.

Don't read this book if you're feeling queasy. It's probably really amazing poetic imagery, but it didn't do good things for me.

I don't really recommend this one. Maybe if you are really, really into Japanese mythology, this would be cool. But it wasn't for me.


I still want to read other books by this author, and I'm hoping that some of the others will be more to my taste.

[Jess Lessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favourite book so far contained in the "Myths of Origin" collection. The story follows the journey of a storm-god forced into a human body and charged with slaying an eight headed dragon. Chapters alternate between the god and the daughters that are each head of the dragon. Admittedly I loved the god's chapters the most. The formatting of the dragon chapters could be difficult to get through. All in all very intriguing and beautifully written.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherynne M. Valente is an amazing writer. I'm reading this again, because I was so taken by it the first time. It's like an updated epic poem; it's not a quick or easy read, but it's a rewarding one, if you have the receptive eye and ear for the narrative, and the stomach for the gore. Brilliant stuff. As soon as I finish this one, I need to get on to her "In the Night Garden," which I've been sitting on for five years or so.

[Zan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Um... Gross?

I mean, yeah, mythomagical archetypal gross, but still-eeeew!

Valente and Okri should get together and spew eloquent rhapsodies of vomitous ancestral phlegm incarnate-hopefully until whatever haplessly interesting plot they had gets completely gnashed to oozy, icky bits and can rest in some semblance of peace.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read and loved both volumes of "The Orphans Tales." so naturally I want to read more!

Got this out of library, so it should be read soon!

Currently reading this, and it is predictably wonderful. Fantasy with a decided Japanese feel to it. Very odd book,but excellent.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

My last Valente book of that last week, but this one was delightful. I love getting into the mythology of Gods, how they interact and grow, the shifting, lovely loyalties. It was very twisted and beautiful to get the pov of all the girls and the monsters as well.

[Deborah Brannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

You can read my review of this novel at Green Man Review.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Valente, but the writing tactic overwhelmed the storytelling for me, all the parentheses and dialogue of the snake heads.... it gave me a headache.

[Missie Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valente's beautiful language and weird plot combine to make a book that is and is not about folklore, universal truths, and women's rights/sisterhood.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this as part of the Myths of Origin omnibus. It's an interesting reinterpretation of Shinto mythology but not to my taste.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't so much a novel as a novel-length (or novella, really) prose poem.

A gorgeous prose poem, as it happens. Catherynne Valente has a way with language like no one I've ever read before.