shannonleighd's review
1.0
I had a hard time with this one and I just kind of skimmed the last 50 pages. The characters are hard to tell apart at first and there's so much going on that it gets really confusing really quickly. Also, I'm not really sure what the point, or message, of this novel was. Talking about it in class today with my professor, who is Japanese, and he couldn't really say where the author was taking it after he finished it either. You get a sense that all the characters are looking for some type of salvation or purpose in life but by the end it's hard to say if they figured anything out.
Also this novel seems to be overly graphic to shock the reader. There's dead infants and cats floating in a canal, baby mice in honey to eat, and decapitated heads stuck on polls with their noses rotting off. I've read worse and seen worse in movies but I suppose for the time this would be rather upsetting to read about, although I'm sure not for the people that lived through it.
The most disturbing part for me was actually less glorified than any of the other violence, it was more or less just told in passing and for me it just made it that more horrible. One of the girls in the novel, Osugi, works in a Turkish bathhouse. She's not a prostitute but she does give baths using her body as a sponge so she's not exactly the most innocent girl. She gets fired and ends up walking to one of her customer's homes, a guy named Sanki and the main character of the novel, who she had inadvertently fallen in love with. She's waiting outside Sanki's door crying when his friend, Koya, comes by. Koya tells her that Sanki isn't home but that she can come inside. Koya ends up falling asleep and Osugi decides she may as well too since she no longer has anywhere to live. In the middle of the night, Koya rapes her while she's half asleep. She gives in and then falls back asleep, but when she wakes up both Sanki and Koya are in the room sleeping and she doesn't know which one raped her. By the end of the novel she still doesn't know who raped her and took her virginity. Osugi's storyline after that didn't really get any better and it just really made the book all the more depressing for me. I just felt so bad for her.
It was interesting to read about this time period and I think if you wanted to learn more about early 20th century Chinese/Japanese history you'd want to check out this book. It's especially good if you want to research the May 30th Incident or want to get a more personal and/or Japanese account of labor riots and strikes that happened in 1925.
Not the greatest Japanese fiction I've read but not the worst. I don't regret reading it but I'd never read it again.
Also this novel seems to be overly graphic to shock the reader. There's dead infants and cats floating in a canal, baby mice in honey to eat, and decapitated heads stuck on polls with their noses rotting off. I've read worse and seen worse in movies but I suppose for the time this would be rather upsetting to read about, although I'm sure not for the people that lived through it.
The most disturbing part for me was actually less glorified than any of the other violence, it was more or less just told in passing and for me it just made it that more horrible. One of the girls in the novel, Osugi, works in a Turkish bathhouse. She's not a prostitute but she does give baths using her body as a sponge so she's not exactly the most innocent girl. She gets fired and ends up walking to one of her customer's homes, a guy named Sanki and the main character of the novel, who she had inadvertently fallen in love with. She's waiting outside Sanki's door crying when his friend, Koya, comes by. Koya tells her that Sanki isn't home but that she can come inside. Koya ends up falling asleep and Osugi decides she may as well too since she no longer has anywhere to live. In the middle of the night, Koya rapes her while she's half asleep. She gives in and then falls back asleep, but when she wakes up both Sanki and Koya are in the room sleeping and she doesn't know which one raped her. By the end of the novel she still doesn't know who raped her and took her virginity. Osugi's storyline after that didn't really get any better and it just really made the book all the more depressing for me. I just felt so bad for her.
It was interesting to read about this time period and I think if you wanted to learn more about early 20th century Chinese/Japanese history you'd want to check out this book. It's especially good if you want to research the May 30th Incident or want to get a more personal and/or Japanese account of labor riots and strikes that happened in 1925.
Not the greatest Japanese fiction I've read but not the worst. I don't regret reading it but I'd never read it again.
jezebelparks's review
2.0
I tried to enjoy this book for what it was, I really did. However, I found the bumbling male characters hard, if not impossible, to like. They are constantly chasing women unrestrained, seemingly never able to concentrate on just one. The females, predictably, were weak for the most part, with the exception of Fang Qui-Lan, but even then, she didn't seem to have much of a plan aside from being an agitator. At least it was short. If it was longer than 250 pages, I would have most likely thrown it across the room.
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