(SFF Bingo): The Sword of Kaigen, by M. L. Wang

The Sword of Kaigen handles POV and pacing really well. It kept me on my toes. I can recommend it highly on those fronts. If you want a story where you can't feel confident in what will happen next, it delivers. But explaining how would go into spoiler territory, which defeats the purpose. So this review is going to have a lot more to say about the negative aspects than the positive ones, even though there are a lot of each.

 

In the opening scenes, we meet Matsuda Mamoru, a fourteen-year-old boy from Mount Takayubi in Shirojima, Kaigen (fantasy Japan, hold that thought). Mamoru is in training to become a master swordsman and jijaka (water/ice/snow manipulator), like generations of Matsudas before him. The arrival of a transfer student unsettles him, however, because the world beyond Shirojima's shores is not dominated by the samurai mindset:

 

“And what fighting style is popular in your region?” he asked, curious about what kind of warrior this boy was.

“What fighting style?” Kwang raised his eyebrows. “Video games.”

 

Kwang's father is in town to install new info-com towers, and Kwang himself has a cell phone with pictures from his international travels. The culture clash is a great comedic setup.

 

We also meet Mamoru's mother, Matsuda Misaki. By the standards of chauvinistic Shirojima society, she's the perfect housewife, raising four jijaka sons. However, her worldview is more open-minded than her circumstances might indicate; when she was a teenager, she studied magic and weaponry abroad and got into superhero antics with her friends after class. She illustrates the Quester/Family Person tropes; as a young person, she was a Quester, and even if it appears she's now a Family Person, she isn't happy with the way her life has gone.

 

"The Sword of Kaigen" is well-regarded in r/fantasy polling, and I suspect one reason for it is the complex elemental magic system. It's not just that jijakalu can call upon ice and snow in lots of different ways to protect themselves (although they certainly do that); they also can get the upper hand in a fight by setting up their opponent's attack to take out the kitchen sink. Some of them can even manipulate blood inside their enemies' bodies, though this is scorned as "impure" by some water specialists. In parts of the world where fire magic is dominant, wood can't be used as building materials. And this leads to cultural stereotypes; Takayubi residents meeting allies from elsewhere in the world assume “Like we’ve got blood inside us, they’ve got fire.”

 

So what's the catch?

 

I mentioned with Tigana that there are a couple different routes to worldbuilding a fantasy setting inspired by RL. One way is the "Uprooted" premise: magic exists, but Polnya and Rosya are very definitely the Poland and Russia of our Earth circa 1600. Another choice is the "Yumi and the Nightmare Painter" approach: Nikaro's homeland doesn't correspond to the island of Honshu or the archipelago of Japan more generally, it's a secondary world with a cultural aesthetic lifted from RL Japan. But veering in between these two can sometimes lead to an uncanny valley, and that's what happened here.

 

The landmasses of Kaigen's world, the "Duma," are our planet Earth with south drawn at the top of the map. (Which is fine! I'm not offended at having my ~preconceptions challenged~ or whatever, you can draw your map however you like whether or not it's our Earth.) People in Kaigen fight with katanas and wear kimonos and count to three by going "ichi, ni, san." They're also on bad terms with Ranga (China), admire the military prowess of Yamma (northwest Africa), and sometimes study abroad in Carytha (Canada). For me, this definitely felt like a lazy worst-of-both-worlds synthesis.

 

Moreover, the infodumps were painful. In chapter two, we have a history class. I understand that the purpose is to contrast the propaganda version of history that Mamoru learns with the actual truth, but no one actually teaches history like this. Not even for the unit on the French Revolution, which is the one unit where my teacher was like "yeah, you actually do need to learn a bunch of names and dates." It's just attacking a strawman.

 

“5286, the year that the Carythian Union formed and resisted Yammanka rule.” Hibiki Sensei wrote the year up on the board. “5287,” he wrote as Mamoru scrambled to catch up with his notes. “In this year, the Sizwean colony of Malusia staged a major uprising that shook Sizwe’s control of the entire region. At the same time, there was a rash of peasant uprisings in the western part of the Kaigenese Empire. These were quickly put down by our own Imperial army, but they foreshadowed bigger rebellions to come…

“5288. Under the influence of corrupt politicians, a collection of cities, led by Ranga, rose against the Kaigenese Empire. This rebellion was put down the same year and its leaders publicly executed for their treason against the Empire.
“5289, the year that Yamma defeated Sizwe for control of Malusia and pressed to take Sizwe’s other colonies, escalating the long-standing tensions between the two Kelenduguka superpowers.
“5290. Kaigen’s western provinces rose up in rebellion once again. Using propaganda and false promises, the Thulanist rebels managed to trick the uneducated peasants of Ranga into following them in greater numbers than ever before. At the same time, the Longhouse Confederacy of Abiria staged a reprisal of its bid for independence in 5153, under the same flag. “At the tail end of that year, on the twenty-eighth of Kribakalo, Ranganese terrorists attacked a graduation ceremony at Daybreak Academy in Carytha, killing principal Oyede Biida along with several Yammanka and Kaigenese students. It was following this malicious and cowardly attack that Yamma agreed to support our great empire in its fight against the Ranganese rebels.
“5291. Early in this year, the Yammankalu allied with us, bringing foreign troops onto Kaigenese soil for the first time. In response to their involvement, Sizwe aligned itself both with our own rebel enemies and with the Abirian rebels fighting against Yamma for their independence. This led to open war between Yamma and Sizwe. Abtya aligned with Yamma.
“5292. This year marked the only time in Duna’s history that all the major theonite powers—Kaigen, Yamma, Abtya, and Sizwe—were at war. It was in this year that the Ranganese fonyakalu launched their attack on Shirojima and were soundly defeated.

 

It gets less rough later, but chapter 25 (out of 31) is basically an aside to illustrate that even people who live in the same country and nominally practice the same religion actually might have very different beliefs about the gods and the creation narrative. We get it!

(There's a character list and glossary at the end; I suspect that if you're familiar with [family name] [personal name] order you don't need it. A lot of characters will die anyway and then you don't need to remember their names. Similarly, there are a lot of substitutes for Earth units like "hours" or "meters," but it's usually pretty clear from context what's being described, even if it goes in one ear and out the other.)

 

The underlying plot is a subtle, nuanced, narrative about breaking cycles of abuse--but it gets bogged down with the straw people necessary to move the plot along. Mamoru, not unreasonably, is disillusioned when he learns about the Empire's propaganda. Why should he bother fighting for a country that's just going to lie and condescend to him? Misaki points out that maybe it doesn't matter: he doesn't necessarily have to fight for the country. If violent enemies came to Takayubi and threated his family and neighbors, would he fight? Yes? Okay, that's what's important.

 

Well, guess what, violent enemies do come to Takayubi and threaten everyone, civilians included. I could understand "the colonists don't like being colonized and they're coming to take the fight to Kaigen now," but that war was eighty years before. These fighters are just here to...be evil and do war crimes? At times they're so over-the-top evil that of course Kaigen's self-defense is justified; at other times, the main characters are like, "it's hard to be mad at them personally, their government doesn't let them know any better, they're the same as us." Later on, we get a tacked-on explanation for why the enemy's tactics are so poorly thought out, but it still doesn't really cohere.

 

Similarly, after the Imperial propaganda machine tries to silence any discussion of the battle, the survivors recognize they can't really survive defying their own government, but they're still upset.

 

“And don’t try to tell me we can remember without speaking of what happened here,” the older woman said, smashing down Misaki’s response before it could even take shape on her lips. “A warrior’s legacy is essential to his soul. To deny what happened here—to ourselves or to anyone else—is the greatest disservice we could do our dead.”

 

But is there a statute of limitations on history? Do we have a duty to carry the burden of every atrocity in the world? How much is too much?

 

(Semi-relatedly, Misaki is the kind of character who can support her friends and point out when they're being ridiculous by blaming themselves for things that were in no way their fault, but can't extend that same logic to herself. I guess I get frustrated when the character archetype is almost-but-not-quite what I'm looking for? Because the things that she [wrongly] blames herself for are very specific things that happened in her own personal life. And I guess I'm looking for advice on how to deal with "blaming yourself for things that aren't particularly my fault, but also aren't specifically mine vis-a-vis many other people's." But that's kind of a petty concern.)

 

Part of the context for the almost-Earth geography, and a couple other plot threads that don't really get resolved, is that this was originally published as the prequel to another series by Wang. In previously-published (but later-set) books, some of the minor characters in this book wind up traveling to our Earth and investigating the "loose ends" from this one. Wang has since discontinued that series and pulled it from publication, so there's that.

 

There are a couple understated humor moments; for instance, in a flashback to Misaki's superhero days, one of her classmates gripes: “Have you noticed,” she said, “that every bloody crime-fighter of my complexion has to have the word ‘white’ in their alias. Like they need to qualify—not a real crime-fighter, a white one.” When it's not too on-the-nose, it can be very funny!

 

Midway through the book, there's also a really effective use of omniscient narrator flashforward--only for a couple sentences, but it says a great deal about how things are going to resolve both in the short and the long terms. That, together with some of the epilogue-ish stuff, left me with a hopeful takeaway for the protagonists. (Maybe even more hopeful if the sequels have been un-canonized so whatever bad things might befall them there don't "need" to happen! :p )

 

I tend not to do numerical ratings, but if I did, I would give this a similar disclaimer to Tigana; this isn't a mediocre 3-star book, so much as a mashup between a 5-star and a 1-star book. (I mean, this kind of thing is probably why I don't do numerical ratings.)

 

Bingo: Picked it up for Elemental Magic which means I'm done with 11 days to go, yay! Also: self-published, POC author; probably superheroes (Misaki and her friends in the flashback have secret identities and do vigilante things, even if it's only a small portion of the story); possibly coastal setting, possibly possibly sequel.

 

Roundup/reddit cross-posting to come soon. :)