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Loading... The Office of Gardens and Pondsby Didier Decoin
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  ForrestFamily | Mar 28, 2020 |  no reviews | add a review
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A mesmerising fable with a difference, set in Japan over 1000 years agoFor readers of Alessandro Baricco's SILK, Patrick Suskind's PERFUME and Takashi Hiraide's THE GUEST CAT.The village of Shimae is thrown into turmoil when master carp-catcher Katsuro suddenly drowns in the murky waters of the Kusagawa river. Who now will carry the precious cargo of carp to the Imperial Palace and preserve the crucial patronage that everyone in the village depends upon?Step forward Miyuki, Katsuro's grief-struck widow and the only remaining person in the village who knows anything about carp. She alone can undertake the long, perilous journey to the Imperial Palace, balancing the heavy baskets of fish on a pole across her shoulders, and ensure her village's future.So Miyuki sets off. Along her way she will encounter a host of remarkable characters, from prostitutes and innkeepers, to warlords and priests with evil in mind. She will endure ambushes and disaster, for the villagers are not the only people fixated on the fate of the eight magnificent carp. But when she reaches the Office of Gardens and Ponds, Miyuki discovers that the trials of her journey are far from over. For in the Imperial City, nothing is quite as it seems, and beneath a veneer of refinement and ritual, there is an impenetrable barrier of politics and snobbery that Miyuki must overcome if she is to return to Shimae. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)843.92Literature French French fiction Modern Period 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.09)
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I had high hopes for the this book - it ticked off so many of my interests:
- Japanese history
- Japanese history that included village life not just aristocracy/'Tale of Genji' world
- Discussion of things like nature, fragrance and colour
- Heian fashion
But it was...not good. For various reasons. Main ones are:
The author is reported to have researched 14 years to write this book. And it shows. There is so much superfluous material in this book that add nothing to the story but the writer could just not let go (and an editor didn't have the guts to cut). Add to that the ostentatious use of Japanese terms that are footnoted. Due to a mix of study and experience I actually knew what a lot of them meant but didn't find the use of them added to the story (and found it weird that he chose to include some terms in the original Japanese and yet translate others). It just looked like another example of 'look at me, I studied this strange and exotic culture, let me show you' rather than 'I decided to leave these in the original language to add verisimilitude to the story'. Frankly I would have found footnotes about the plants a lot more useful (thank-you built in Kindle dictionaries).
- The sex scenes. As many other reviewers point out, they are cringeworthy. I am not a prude - my list of favourite literature includes books like 'Story of O' so I don't mind a sex scene if it is well written and has a place in the story. The sex scenes in this book are neither well written, or in most places add to the story. They are so bad I really can't even think that it is a problem with the translation in to English.
There are some interesting parts to this story - I particularly liked how Decoin attempted to explore the headspace of someone coming from an isolated village and how their view of the world would be shaped by that, to the point of not having words for many of the new things she experienced. But that is not enough to save this book. It is, in short, not very good. Which is a shame as there was a lot of potential behind it. (