I have been reading this small book for weeks. It should not take me so long to read a barely two hundred page book. I'm a reading ninja! Not to bang my own gong or anything but I am. It's boring. Maybe it'll take me fourteen years like it took the translator to translate it from Japanese into English. I appreciate that Inoue wanted to fill in the decade gap of history about the thousand Buddha caves and the silk road but... Yawn. Boring. It reads like James Cameron's Titanic if it were not even hocking loogies and evil henchmen and rapes from gay looking men (the kind of fun in a twisted not exactly fun as we know it way). We don't know how people really were for these ten years so let's just shoot for the mark somewhere between dead boring and stilted. Let's take something historically interesting and instead focus on a generic Hollywood love triangle type romance! The cover of my copy is even a still photograph of the failed epic production Dun-Huang (it's epic because it's big!). I'm unsure if that is connected to this story or not. It looked boring to me, anyway, from clips. The worst movie I've ever seen (Pavilion of Women) was a co-production with China and also epically sucked. You could say that I am prejudiced, if you wanted to say that I was prejudiced. Anyway, exactly my point! Battle scenes, battle scenes, battle scenes. It reads like the token racial acknowledgement in the Kevin Costner Robin Hood (the Morgan Freeman/Allah stuff, not the Christian Slater parts). Wouldn't that be fun? It's not. They have adventures and do stuff and it is all for looooove. I hate reading now! I guess I shouldn't have been reading a "novel" instead of history if that's not what I wanted. This is what people did before they wrote histories. They made shit up. Too bad that shit had to be boring. But can't there be real characters? Inoue's The Hunting Gun was so good. What happened? There were scrolls that were hidden and then found. There are drawings and meaning attached to the caves and struggles for cultural identity. So why would you imagine what happened to happen to bloodless people that could have happened in any crappy old movie to any old crappy movie people? To please imagined generic people who probably don't have as little imagination as they are purported to have? Let's say let's not. Tun-Huang the novel has a good reputation. I thought it was going to be a different kind of historical novel, you know? It's not. It's the same.Fourteen years... How did this lady go to work every day? I'm dying after fourteen days. (It could be all her fault. BORING.)I talked myself out of it. I give up right before the end. Go on without me. At least Inoue got a promised trip to China out of it (I don't know if he really got to go). I didn't get to go to Tun-huang. It's not fair that my feet hurt after walking around for hours in a museum with the wrong cards. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. What's hsia-hsia for Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz? Maybe you have to be buddhist and like stories with a moral to them. I wanted real characters who come to believe rather than believe because that's the moral the story wanted. I don't know. Ask me in fourteen years!P.s. I should research before I write reviews. The film Dun-Huang was an adaptation of this book. It makes more sense they used those film stills now.
His style is concise to the point of historical summary, frequently, but he seems to cover large ground in his books of 200-250 pages. The haiku of historical novels? I didn’t know what to make of this at first, particularly with the summary passages. It slowly dawned on me that it’s quite the little work of art. Probably better in Japanese. The characters were drawn in enigmatic strokes. I couldn’t predict what they were going to do. The Uighur girl who changes lives, but is a victim of everyone herself, remains nameless. The hero is far from a saint, even a soldier-saint, but I cared, as us bookish types must, when he found his calling to save the Buddhist scriptures from the wars. This is the only novel I know of about the Tangut, here in the early expansionist days of their state, Xi Xia in Chinese or with a native name that has been translated The Great State of White and High. There were odd details. His early job as a conscript is to fire a ‘whirlwind cannon’ from horseback as he gallops through enemy lines; he faints each time, but that’s fine as he’s hooked onto his horse. Later he’s involved in the establishment of a Tangut script. This state on the outskirts of China was in constant tension as to how influenced by China/how independent to be, and Inoue paints the changes of policy, and the consequences of statehood, in his brief but telling brushstrokes. Our Chinese hero has been mysteriously attracted hither, after another short, strange, never-forgotten encounter with a girl, Tangut this time. I was made uncomfortable by his attention to ‘race’, which you can argue isn’t very eleventh-century, but these are muddy waters. Great little book. I’m onto my next of his.
What do You think about Tun-huang (2010)?
fun out West!Yasushi Inoue's Tonkou invents a story behind the supposed monk who sealed off the Dunhuang cave during the Song, for Aurel Stein to "rediscover" it in 1907, marking the beginning of a time-honored tradition of stealing delicious texts from Dunhuang. Four chapters in, Xingde has fallen asleep at his jinshi exam at Kaifeng and has had several adventures out west meeting sexy women as a Xixia soldier. As if the conceit of this historical fiction weren't cool enough, it also reads inte
—Alex
