Really, I felt it was an unnecessary element to reinforce the exoticism for the reader. Every time they regularly end a sentence with hai instead of ne, I got pulled from the story.
Any time they interact with each other, the dialog is stilted with Orientalisms. It goes from worse to awful with the Japanese-coded characters. In reality, the shamisen is a three-stringed instrument similar to a guitar but the words he uses to describe the instrument suggest he meant a koto, a Japanese zither. In another linguistic blunder, he mentions court ladies playing the shamisen. One pointed out the two kanji can be used as a nickname, but pronounced either ranko or tora. When I asked native Japanese speakers what they thought it was, I got puzzled expressions. While the Western powers trying to open Japan to trade made the same mistake back in the 1850s, I would expect better research from a novel written in the Information Age.Įven worse, the griffin is called an arashitora, a literal mashup of storm and tiger in Japanese kanji.
However, Kristoff is already mangling the concept of Shogun (a military title) by including ministers (an imperial court position). Lotus is a metaphor for the modern fossil fuel economy, the Shogun a stand-in for the oligarchs who rule our world.
He tasks a hunting party, led by the father of the main character, Yukiko, to capture it.Īs a concept, it’s cool. The premise of the story is in a world powered and poisoned by a lotus weed, the ruling Shogun has heard from his ministers about the reappearance of a mysterious griffin.
Still, I know enough that two chapters into Stormdancer, I was cringing. I took the accusations with a grain of salt, since the term is bandied about with knee-jerk abandon, and decided that one day, I’d dig Stormdancer off the slopes of Mount TBR to find out for myself.įor the two of you who follow my articles (my daughters, who wouldn’t read them if I didn’t withhold dinner), you know I don’t really read as much as listen to novels so that one day probably would have become never had I not been able to snag the audiobook for $2.50.Īlthough I lived in the Japanese countryside for a year, married a native Japanese, read extensively about Warring States and End-of-Tokugawa eras, and watched hundreds of period and pop dramas, I am no expert on Japanese culture. In April of last year, the Twitterverse erupted with charges of cultural appropriation in Jay Kristoff’s debut, Stormdancer.
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