It's insulting to every reader that she would be so lazy as to simply slap a 'Yae' in front of gahara and imitate such an important battle. Yeah, spending an afternoon researching battles and actual lords would have been so tough. The infuriating thing is that she uses the feuds, anger, and tension that came from the battle of Sekigahara but apparently didn't want to learn anything about it.

which is clearly just a ripoff of the real battle of Sekigahara. Now there is the infamous battle of Yaegahara from her book. If we had to read every time a character took a piss it wouldn't be interesting either. Include the quakes in exposition, don't stop the story to put them in. Maybe that's real, but it's also retarded. The characters are talking about something and then the author stops to make everything shake, then everyone has to acknowledge the quake, then we resume. All it does is randomly distract from the story. This would be informative of the climate and area, but it isn't - it's irritating. She apparently read somewhere that Japan gets a lot of earthquakes, so the characters experience them, constantly. Terrain/Geography/History This is pretty hard to F up but Hearn does it anyway. The conversations are flat and would fail if they were imitating normal conversation, in that they should be trying for feudal speech they fail astoundingly. It isn't emotional, even the character seems to know this, and it isn't realistic. There is a two-page dialogue about a characters past that is painfully bad. It's hard to tell because it is so blunt but she implies that they are saying something else. Language Other novels written about or in Japan (Shogun, to name one) have tried to successfully capture the way people spoke saying one thing and meaning another. So, okay, Hearn didn't do that justice base a book of a land and F up their religion, okay. But in Hearn's world everyone is predominantly Christian, or at least they worship a god an awful lot like the Christian god like looking down on suicide, which was a part of the way of life in Japan. It persecuted Christianity in the same way that Rome did it's teachings undermined the ruling order. This book is written as if Hearn simply googled Japan and then decided to write a book on it. I would think that it being set in Japan, Hearn would have learned anything about the place, but she apparently did not.

Normally a bad book is just that, but this book is actually infuriatingly bad.įirstly, it's a fantasy book set in feudal Japan. I'll try to be as kind and heartfelt as possible.

Over the nightingale floor