Customer Reviews

Fudoki

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Inspired by Japanese myth, Johnson's ("The Fox Woman") second fantasy follows the wanderings of an orphaned cat, a creature sprung from the mind of Harueme, a Japanese princess who has lived a long, privileged and circumscribed life.

Near death, Harueme begins to fill blank notebooks - a new one for each chapter - with the cat's story, interwoven with her own memories. The young tortoiseshell cat lost her family, and with them, her fudoki - her spiritual lineage - in a terrible fire. She sets out on an aimless journey, bereft of name, family and purpose, and encounters gods and people, none of whom hold any interest for her. But ignoring the gods can have a price and the little cat is transformed into a woman - with enough cat qualities and spirit-aid to help her on her adventures.

Free and alone, she is unlike Harueme who has never been either. But Harueme has her own power, not least of which is her imagination. Harueme absorbs the world as people bring it to her in tales, and the cat-woman keeps the world at bay as she moves through it, defending her life, making friends, acquiring a reputation and a name: Kagaya-hime, woman warrior.

Johnson's writing is fluid and musical, her characters archetypes and real at the same time, and the historical detail is imaginatively, visually realized. But Harueme, though pampered, selfish and captive, is more involving than the cat-woman, whose humorless detachment is, well, too feline, for real identification. But Johnson makes us believe that Kagaya-hime is what a cat-turned-woman would be like, and this tale of love, belonging, freedom and redemption is as rewarding as it is different.

There's a saying that I can't remember at the moment, something about painting a picture with words. I wasn't really aware until I read this book that it was possible to paint an entire world with them - that's the way this book comes across to me, as broad strokes on rough canvas.

Fudoki takes place in Japan round about 1000AD-ish, and the story is that of a princess, Harueme, who is nearing the end of her life. She, in turn, is telling a story about a cat, and the book takes us through both her own and her character's tale, weaving back and forth between them at Harueme's whim.

I'm glad I bought this book, because I knew even half way through reading it that I would want to re-read it in the future - so much is touched on in the story. I think it will be well worth going through it again, knowing the characters better right from the get-go. There are some great themes, and they're touched on in so many different ways: death, freedom, strength, and how they all intertwine. This is one of those stories that I didn't want to end - I kept checking to see how many pages I had left - but am glad it did where it did. Open-ended, and yet extremely satisfying.

Fudoki allowed me a glimpse of medieval Japan unlike any I've encountered before. The text itself is a fairly engaging story littered with jewels of prose that left me thinking, "Wow. Lovely." I had trouble getting into it at first, I think because I was being impatient, but once I was more than a quarter of the way through, I was hooked.

"Fudoki" in Japanese literally means "description of natural features" - an ancient record created in feudal Japan of the culture, topography and folklore of a particular place. However, the word has far more meaning for the character of the story-within-a-story told in Kij Johnson's novel of the same name.

Kagaya-hime is a black tortoiseshell cat who has lost her family and extended clan in a fire. They and their predecessors were part of Kagaya-hime's "fudoki" - a cat's hearth and home, soul and line of succession. In her search to find a new place where she belongs, Kagaya-hime travels along the Tokaido - one of the ancient routes connecting Edo and Kyoto - and is watched by the spirit of the road, a kami. The kami decides to test the cat on her journey by changing her into a beautiful woman... albeit a woman whose behavior and words are those of a cat.

The cat's tale is being told by the elderly Princess Harueme, who feels compelled to fill the pages of a notebook with a story before she goes to spend her final years in solitude and religious contemplation at a Buddhist convent. The novel deftly weaves back and forth between the tale of Kagaya-hime and Harueme's own story, which is sometimes peppered in as commentary to the cat's story. The princess readily admits to being jealous of her own creation, who is free to experience both pain and the freedom to roam which are denied to a member of the royal court. Harueme cannot help but share some of the joy and pain that she has experienced during her long years.

Just like her previous novel "The Fox Woman," Johnson has taken the world of Heian-era Japan and imbued it with a fresh take on some of the Japanese mythology which originated during that period. As other reviewers have noted, Johnson is one of those rare Western authors who is able not only to successfully spin a tale using characters and themes from the East, but also effectively utilize an Asian storytelling style in the English language. Her prose is quite delicately crafted and her descriptions of the people and places of long-ago Japan are very richly detailed.

I highly recommend this book, and am very much looking forward to the final installment of Johnson's Heian trilogy.

No one captures the essence of a period and a setting better than Kij Johnson. This exquisite book will charm you right through to the end, and the old Princess will haunt your memories! I loved it.

First, I have to say, that jacket description is riddled with so many small inaccuracies about this story that I was tempted not to include it. They aren't fundamentally important inaccuracies -- though it is very important to realize that the "she" referred to at the start of the second paragraph is Kagaya-hime, not the "aging empress" who isn't an empress at all -- but it bugs me now that I've read the story to see how wrong it is. Ah well, moving on.

This is a wonderful book, sure to appeal to fans of Patricia McKillip and Catherynne Valente, though it's more accessible than either of their work. It's very much rooted in the myths of Japan, and while I don't know a ton about the time period, nothing of what I do know was contradicted by what Johnson wrote, so I am assuming that she captured the era (Heian-era Japan I believe) with some degree of accuracy. Like in McKillip and Valente's work, this is not fantasy that lovingly details a set of rules for its magic system; it is fantasy where there are gods and there are humans and there are animals and the lines between these things are not sharp at all, where anything can happen and no one is much surprised when anything does. Logic plays a role, but it's dream logic, and the worst error to commit is in assuming that any other being's motivations match our own.

But what made this book brilliant (and caused it to be nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award) is the way in which it is fundamentally a womens' fantasy. The fudoki of the cats is entirely female; there is no place for males, and none of the fudoki cares to even know the names of the toms that fathered their kittens. Harueme (this would be the aging noblewoman narrating Kagaya-hime's tale, half-sister to the former Emperor Shirakawa) also lives in an almost entirely female world, where women have husbands and lovers but their days are spent hidden from male sight (and even the seductions take place with an eye to maintaining the illusion that no man can see their faces). Harueme loved her half-brother, and reminisces about her soldier-lover Domei, but the most important relationship she has is with her attendant, Shigeko. The novel even acknowledges that women menstruate -- I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the SF/F novels that do that -- and there are elaborate (historically-based, I assume) codes of conduct built around that simple fact of life. It's a novel about women's issues: family and home and place in a society when all of those things are rigidly proscribed.

It works on a pure fantasy level too, with the cat-transformed-into-a-human element and the presence of the kami (which are a whole class of gods, not the name of a specific god as the jacket implies) and even a small war of revenge that leads to a seige; and I'm pretty sure it works as historical fiction, though as I've said I don't know very much about the time period so I can't attest to its accuracy. But it will linger in my memory because it shows a slice of life fantasy novels too often forget, not with any particular message, but just because these are stories that rarely get told. I wish there were more novels like this.

I read Fox Woman with some hesitation initially. I had picked it up on a whim while in LA and needing something to read. I quickly loved Johnson's sensual, storytelling-type writing style, but when I completed the book, it felt like something was missing from the story, most likely structure.

In Fudoki, I was impressed with her writing overall. Her narrative frame, where the story moves between the dying princess and the warrior cat, was extremely well done, and I felt like what I had been wanting in the first book had borne fruit in this book.

The rich storytelling was wonderful to read, leaving one, at the end, unsure who was real and who was only telling a tale. A mind locked in a palace versus a cat who bitterly becomes human and find her way... both were compelling and necessary components, fueled with Heian Japanese historical detail and a reader's investment in the character's development. Her sensual writing style was well used in this story, better controlled than in her first book, and beautifully carried by the tale.

I bought it on a whim, but I'm glad that Johnson didn't disappoint. I look forward to her other books being of the same caliber or better!

The second reviewer (12/24/03) took most of the words out of my mouth--this book is not as successful as The Fox Woman. I did not find it slow, however. It is shorter and simpler than Johnson's previous book, and characters who appear in both are somewhat re-worked. It answers one or two of the questions left hanging at the end of The Fox Woman (no, not *that* one).

I enjoy Johnson's ability to portray the animal characteristics of her shape-shifter--the cat-woman behaves very much like a cat--and her avoidance of modern, Western sensibilities to create a world both historical and mythical.

Writing in the Japanese tradition is a difficult challenge for Westerners. I thought Fox Woman had promise, but tripped me up in some aspects; this book shows the promise fulfilled.

Johnson writes with lyrical grace, as if she has distilled the style and it flows effortlessly. The story is intensely poignant yet earthy and entertaining, the idea of the fudoki magnificently realized.

I really look forward to this author's future work; it's worth buying in hardcover.

I had a longer review written up, but the internet ate it and I don't feel like writing it all again. Let's just say it's an excellent marriage of Eastern folklore storytelling and Western narratives. Absolutely beautiful. I loved both this one and The Fox Woman, but I think I liked this one slightly more due to the fact that my cats won't forgive me otherwise.