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Aug. 1st, 2010 04:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaTHE CONCUBINE'S TATTOO, by Laura Joh Rowland.
Cover copy: Twenty months spent as the shogun's sosakan-sama -- most honorable investigator of events, situations and people - has left Sano Ichiro weary. He looks forward to the comforts that his arranged marriage promises: a private life with a sweet, submissive wife and a month's holiday to celebrate their union. However, the death of the shogun's favorite concubine interrupts the couple's wedding ceremony and shatters any hopes the samurai detective had about enjoying a little peace with his new wife.
After Sano traces the cause of Lady Harume's death to a self-inflicted tattoo, he must travel into the cloistered, forbidden world of theshogun's women to untangle the complicated web of Harume's lovers, rivals, and troubled past, and identify her killer.
To make matters worse, Reiko, his beautiful young bride, reveals herself to be not a traditional obedient wife, but instead, a headstrong, intelligent, aspiring detective bent on helping Sano with his new case. Sano is horrified at her unladylike behavior, and the resulting sparks make their budding love as exciting as the mystery surrounding Lady Harume's death.
Amid the heightened tensions and political machinations of feudal Japan, Sano faces a daunting, complex investigation.
Gender of detectives: two male, one female
This is another series that I'd tried picking up, but which hadn't caught my interest. This time around, however, I had a specific interest. According to the same fannish scuttlebutt that had recommended the series to me, Reiko was a total Mary Sue.
Is she? She certainly has elements in that direction: an expert martial artist, as clever and observant as Sano. But the part that really makes me raise my eyebrows is how gender issues are handled.
Women's power, in Japan of this era, seems to have been entirely indirect -- they could act only by influencing a man to do what they wanted. At least, this is how the roles of women-who-are-not-Reiko are portrayed. Reiko, however, has supposedly been brought up as if she were a son instead of a daughter. Thismiraculously gave her the outlook of, well, a modern woman. Sano realizes, remarkably quickly for so great a change, that the traditional life of a woman kind of sucksa, and thus agrees to all of Reiko's demands. "We will both have to make changes," Sano says, but where are the changes Reiko is making?
So. For I ARE INDEPENDANT WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR, I'd put her on the borderline. But not past it, not yet, not for this book alone. The next book...well, I'd have to read it.
Cover copy: Twenty months spent as the shogun's sosakan-sama -- most honorable investigator of events, situations and people - has left Sano Ichiro weary. He looks forward to the comforts that his arranged marriage promises: a private life with a sweet, submissive wife and a month's holiday to celebrate their union. However, the death of the shogun's favorite concubine interrupts the couple's wedding ceremony and shatters any hopes the samurai detective had about enjoying a little peace with his new wife.
After Sano traces the cause of Lady Harume's death to a self-inflicted tattoo, he must travel into the cloistered, forbidden world of theshogun's women to untangle the complicated web of Harume's lovers, rivals, and troubled past, and identify her killer.
To make matters worse, Reiko, his beautiful young bride, reveals herself to be not a traditional obedient wife, but instead, a headstrong, intelligent, aspiring detective bent on helping Sano with his new case. Sano is horrified at her unladylike behavior, and the resulting sparks make their budding love as exciting as the mystery surrounding Lady Harume's death.
Amid the heightened tensions and political machinations of feudal Japan, Sano faces a daunting, complex investigation.
Gender of detectives: two male, one female
This is another series that I'd tried picking up, but which hadn't caught my interest. This time around, however, I had a specific interest. According to the same fannish scuttlebutt that had recommended the series to me, Reiko was a total Mary Sue.
Is she? She certainly has elements in that direction: an expert martial artist, as clever and observant as Sano. But the part that really makes me raise my eyebrows is how gender issues are handled.
Women's power, in Japan of this era, seems to have been entirely indirect -- they could act only by influencing a man to do what they wanted. At least, this is how the roles of women-who-are-not-Reiko are portrayed. Reiko, however, has supposedly been brought up as if she were a son instead of a daughter. This
So. For I ARE INDEPENDANT WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR, I'd put her on the borderline. But not past it, not yet, not for this book alone. The next book...well, I'd have to read it.