Lian Hearn is a pseudonym of Australian author Gillian Rubenstein Here is the official Otori web site. An interesting interview with Lian Hearn.
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Across the Nightingale Floor

Across the Nightingale Floor is the first volume of a trilogy set in a fictional land based on feudal Japan. Although vaguely resembling Barry Hughart's novels of fictional ancient China in this way, the land of Floor is less fantastic in character.

Young Takeo is one of the Hidden, a people who live in remote areas of the land in question. Some years earlier, a war between the eastern and middle regions left a tyrant, Iida, in control of the lands, and Iida is setting about exterminating the Hidden. Takeo returns to his village from a day abroad to find that Iida's forces have exterminated its populace. He briefly confronts Iida, then runs away, pursued by some soldiers. He is rescued by Otori Shigeru, a noble of the Otori, the people on the losing end of the war with Iida. Shigeru rescues Takeo and brings him home to Hagi where he initiates procedures to adopt the boy.

Takeo displays some unusual talents, notably the ability to clearly hear things in minute detail even some distance away. This leads some to suspect that he is one of the Tribe, a scattered family of individuals who act as talents-for-hire, with various abilities including moving silently, turning invisible for short times, and sending a shadow-self out to distract others. The Tribe sends Kenji, an older man and long-time ally of Shigeru's, to tutor Takeo in his skills.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Shirakawa Kaede, a young woman who has been held hostage for years by one of Iida's allies. Strong-willed but trapped, Kaede is involved in the deaths of two men, leading some to see her as bad luck. Iida and his secret allies among the Otori see this as an opportunity to deal with two problems at once, and Kaede is betrothed to Shigeru, as a condition of Shigeru's adoption of Takeo. To this end, all parties travel to the heart of Iida's lands for the wedding, a proverbial rendezvous with destiny which few other than Iida expect could go well.

Across the Nightingale Floor is told in alternating chapters, a first-person account by Takeo, and a third-person chronicle of Kaede. Takeo is by far the more interesting character, and although Kaede has a few good moments overall she's fairly bland and seems as disappointing a match for the strong male protagonist as Ekaterin is for Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan.

Most of the depth lies in Takeo's story. He begins as a fairly passive and humble member of the Hidden, a believer in peace, and grateful for Shigeru's rescue, although feeling deeply undeserving of it. Takeo becomes increasingly torn by his choices and where the right actions lie, but he remains fiercely loyal to Shigeru, who is the one person who has always treated him kindly without any ambiguity. On the way to Shigeru's wedding, Takeo falls in love with Kaede - less of a conflict than it seems as Shigeru is not keen on the marriage himself - and is thrown into the pressure-cooker of Iida's fortress, where his relationships with Shigeru, the Tribe, and Kaede place him in an emotionally untenable position until Iida acts.

The "nightingale floor", by the way, is a wooden floor constructed to squeak or "sing" when people walk across it. Such a floor is placed outside Iida's bedchamber, and Takeo knows he must cross it if he is to kill Iida, the goal he sets for himself when the journey begins.

The ending is both neat and messy at once, with several threads being tied up off-panel (as it were), while other threads are deftly sidestepped, neatly tackled head-on, or left at loose ends. It's an appropriate ending for the meditative tone of the novel, with some goals being achieved while others remain unreachable.

Floor overall is not an extremely deep novel, and for my money it was Takeo and his relationships with Shigeru and Kenji which made the book work for me. Hearn's prose is quite pretty and the story is a page-turner. Despite the low "fantastic ideas" content, I enjoyed it enough to buy the two sequels. Which is a pretty good endorsement.

Grass For His Pillow

Grass For His Pillow picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of Across The Nightingale Floor, but despite the same writing style and same characters, this is an only superficially similar novel, and a much weaker one.

To avenge the death of his mentor and adopted father Otori Shigeru, Otori Takeo struck a bargain with the Tribe, that band of people in the Three Countries possessed of supernatural powers and ninja-like attitudes, to give himself over to them and be obedient and subject to their training. So he is smuggled to the north under the eyes of two young Tribe - Akio, a man who hates him as a rival in the family, and Yuki, a young woman in whom he finds a mutual attraction.

Meanwhile, Takeo's true love, Shirakawa Kaede, has been left behind to face the fury of Arai, the warlord who has conquered the middle lands and is poised to become the new leader of the Three Countries. Arai is angry that Takeo has abandoned him and a promising potential marriage to Kaede, and that Kaede desires to return to her own lands and to take up the inheritance of a neighboring country. She does so, but finds herself the mistress of a weakened domain, and is forced to rely on the kindness of the nearby Lord Fujiwara, who desires her as a beautiful object to secret in his home. Kaede struggles to assert her authority and to hold her family together even as she longs to be with and marry Takeo.

Takeo's odyssey with the Tribe is one of hardship and hard work, and it leads him back to the land of the Otori, and then to a pact with the Outcasts, men whom warriors and nobles shun but who see Takeo as a savior. Takeo is given a prophesy which promises greatness in his future, but also some specific pieces of hardship for all that he has been touched by destiny.

While Nightingale was a clever, inspiring and often-subtle story, it seems that something went badly wrong at some point in the writing of the sequel. It might be as simple as the absence of Shigeru, Takeo's wise and caring mentor who was the calm at the center of Takeo's life. Takeo was a shy boy of great potential not yet realized, and with some clear limitations which he was forced to overcome in the story arc which revolved very much around Shigeru's history. With that cord cut, Takeo seems to grow too quickly to manhood, and his story becomes less one of a young man making mistakes, learning from them, and making amends for them than of a young warrior seeking to unite the kingdoms in peace - a story which is fundamentally impersonal and not especially novel.

I was not especially interested in Kaede in the first book, and here she seems to be following nothing more (or less) than xyz's story arc in Gone With the Wind - not perhaps the worst model for a story, but considerably diminished here. Kaede might have been an interesting character had she been cognizant of the basic contradiction between her desire for independence and her desire to be Takeo's wife, but these two elements are treated independently and neither is especially interesting on its own. Kaede might perhaps have been a good protagonist of her own series - the true hero - but as the second banana to Takeo her story rings hollow.

The story truly takes a bad turn with the prophesy of Takeo's future. Prophesies are dangerous things in novels, as unless handled deftly they sharply constrain the structure of the novel and suck much of the drama out of the tale. And the prophesy here feels entirely out-of-place in the story, whose handling of supernatural events has generally been more low-key than this. It was a disappointing turn of events, and confirmed my feeling that the story had taken a wrong turn somewhere.

I also had trouble seeing Arai as the burgeoning heavy in the story, as at the beginning of the novel he had looked favorably on a Takeo-Kaede marriage, and his change of mind is not really explored and doesn't make a lot of sense. Arai remains a cipher in the story, yet his decisions vitally impact the development of the story. It was hard to swallow.

Grass is one of those "half-sequels" where (it seems like) the first book was so strongly received that the second and third installments really read like one complete sequel, so Grass ends abruptly without really ending, and not doing a lot more than setting up events for the finale. But Grass is considerably inferior to its predecessor, and doesn't indicate that the third book in the trilogy will be a whole lot better.

Brilliance of the Moon

Brilliance of the Moon concludes the story of Otori Takeo's rise to power in a fictional nation resembling historical Japan. It continues directly from where Grass For His Pillow left off, and like its predecessor is something of a disappointment on the heels of the first book, Across The Nightingale Floor.

The story follows Takeo and his wife, Kaede, as Takeo fulfills the prophecy from Grass: After winning four battles and losing one Takeo will bring peace to the land. As with all prophesy-based stories, much of the suspense is removed through the existence of the prophesy, the main question being what the hero will have to lose or give up to fulfill the prophesy. In Takeo's case, his love for Kaede is really all that he might lose that would have true meaning to him, so when Kaede falls into a clever trap mid-way through the book, this becomes the main source of tension in the story.

Takeo's five battles are dutifully counted up, and he gains the loyalty of an army as he fights to take his rightful place at the head of the Otori. His main obstacle is Arai, the current lord of the three kingdoms, who is angry with Takeo for disobeying him earlier and who is preparing to go to war against the Otori.

I was pretty disillusioned mid-way through this book, feeling like Hearn was essentially "playing out the string" where her plot had taken her. Since I've never found Kaede to be a compelling character, I had a hard time being too upset about her predicament while a prisoner. Takeo's rite of passage and the occasionally distasteful acts he must perform on his way to becoming a leader were decent enough grist, but it really all felt rote somehow.

I had this feeling that somewhere along the way Hearn had simply taken a wrong turn in plotting the story. Whereas Nightingale was structured in a fairly traditional manner, it sidestepped many of the essential elements of the tradition to create something that felt just that little bit different, that extra touch that made it worth reading. Its two sequels seemed to stay close to the well-trodden road and offered few surprises. The one big surprise - when Takeo finally confronts Arai - is at first a welcome turn of events, but becomes bizarrely nasty as the story reaches its climax. Arai's motivations always seem partly shrouded, and partly implausible. He never really works well as the "heavy" for these reasons.

All-in-all, a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy. I would recommend that people interested in the series just read Nightingale and skip the last two books. I think you'll find it a more rewarding experience that way.