No wonder this series has a zillion volumes – in a cunning exercise in self-reflexivity, author Kazuki is gently introducing the reader to the huge, multi-century technology tree that would ultimately end with the book they are holding in their hands. All this, however, is a prelude to her grand enterprise, a quest to create books from square one – making her own paper, learning how to saddle-stitch and bind, and even writing them herself. Whereas the leading man in How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom is basically handed a nation on a platter and goes around fixing things by decree, Urano has to rebuild her new home-world from the ground up, starting by making her own shampoo with a mortar and pestle, and trying to persuade her family members to clear out the lice and spiders and try using soap. But Urano is eternally, comedically aghast at the stench of her new home, the dangers of rotting meat in the marketplace, and the adults’ hand-waving attitude towards giving alcohol to children. In fact, there are books, but they are only bespoke, hand-scribed curios for the elite, and unlike many a Japanese fantasy-novel protagonist, parachuted into the upper echelons of society, Urano has ended up in the malnourished, sickly body of a child of the medieval underclass.ĭear reader, I am sick of Japanese light-novel characters, whisked away to saccharine, barely described other-worlds based on some teenager’s half-remembered sight of a video game. So, imagine finding yourself in a world where not even a Dan Brown novel is available, where despite having Swedish-Finnish names, the locals have never heard of a sauna or soap… and did I mention there were no books? I was once a guest in someone’s home where the sole piece of visible literature, left out on the coffee table to impress visitors, was a Dan Brown novel. But worst of all, worse even than the fact that her Dad is now apparently a green-haired man called Gunther, is the fact that she has found herself in a world without books. For starters, she is revolted by how dirty everybody is, and she is soon missing the mod-cons of a Japanese bathroom. And so, it’s yet another tale of a Japanese twenty-something, spirited away to a mysterious otherworld, except Urano isn’t so keen on this one.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |