Cloud of Sparrows

Takashi Matsuoka

Takashi Matsuoka's debut novel, Cloud of Sparrows, is quite a treat. The similarities between the code of the Samurai and the code of the Wild West gunfighter has been done before, of course, but never within such an elaborate framework. The novel begins on New Year's Day 1861, with the arrival of three American missionaries to Akaoka. Akaoka's present Great Lord, Genji, has a reputation as an effeminate dilettante, keeps company with Japan's most beautiful geisha, has a completely insane uncle who's locked up in a monastery after he murdered his family, is marked for assassination by the head of the Shogun's secret police, and sees prophetic visions, like one member of every generation in his clan. Or does he? It might be a ruse to keep the natives from getting restless.

And that's all within the first few pages. The reader is advised to sit back and get ready for the ride.

Despite everything that's going on in the first few pages, there's a slowness to them; for about fifty pages or so, as we meet and get to know the characters, the novel progresses at a quite leisurely pace. Don't let this put you off. The book picks up quickly enough and the rest of its four-hundred-odd pages fly by. All that background does have a use.

If there is one nit I can pick with this book, it's in the character of Emily, one of the missionaries. As with all fantasies (though this book is far more historical novel; the only real fantasy element in it is Genji's family's gift of prophecy), there is a romantic component. Emily, betrothed to the head missionary, stays quite in character for most of the novel; towards the end, however, she breaks character rather radically. Takashi does his best to hide this (most of it is done offstage), but there's still a niggling in the mind that a book with such well-drawn, true characters takes such an easy way out. In the greater scheme of things, however, this is a minor enough detail when held up against the rest of the novel.

Well worth looking into.