A timeless genre picture of a strong woman making the best out of terrible circumstances.
Not just the personal story of the main protagonist is very A timeless genre picture of a strong woman making the best out of terrible circumstances.
Not just the personal story of the main protagonist is very well written, it´s how Japans´culture and history are shown in a new perspective one wouldn´t have ever thought of because of the stigmas and prejudices the same men haunting the poor women are imposing on them with their conservative, misogynic policy.
The Asian way Sexist male dominance manifested in many different forms and how the Japanese culture arranged prostitution has hardly ever been described in such memorable words, metaphors, and pictures. The strange thing is that all that glitter and glamour around it, letting it seem cultivated and less primitive, creates the disturbing impression that it´s not as bad as it is, something so cognitive biasy that it´s hard to stomach, understand, and put in context to the cultural impact, especially when comparing the very different approaches towards it around the world.
Prostituion by region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostit... As so often, the Scandinavians set the best, new policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostit... , with „Neo-abolitionism - illegal to buy sex and for 3rd party involvement, legal to sell sex“ (that´s once a word with Neo that is not evil) thereby making it illegal for the clients to buy sex and not criminalize the prostitutes. That´s an important approach away from victim blaming and slut shaming, the punishment of the female victims, and offender protection that is law in many other bigoted, conservative, sexist states, towards a more enlightened society. Critics like to claim that this would increase sexual violence and rape, but maybe just every sexual offender should be facing life imprisonment without any chance of probation, maybe including permanent chemical castration so that he can´t all the time happily masturbate to his snuff rape fantasies in his cell.
Traditions and culture of exploitation According to the stereotypical calm, silent, mindful, and introverted Asian mentality, even the sex business is full of ceremonies, traditions, and elements that couldn´t have developed in other cultures with less focus on elegance and aesthetics. Of course, it´s still sick and disgusting, but at least it goes with the option for women to reach a certain status and adds art, culture, and class to the perverted mix.
Talent and obsession It´s one of the greatest fiction without fantasy novels I´ve read, one of the rare cases when talent meets the lifelong interest of an author in a topic or culture and is distilled to something so amazing that it isn´t exaggerated to say that there might hardly be ever a similar novel written that has the same intensity in dealing with this theme.
Sociocultural impact of prostitution What´s more bigoted, letting it all seem shiny, noble, and cultivated, hiding it or making it illegal or the open, direct, strangely still somewhat illegal, Western way? There is so much behind this, parts of it already mentioned in „Prostitution by region“, and it would take far too long to mention all the complexity, and especially misogyny, behind it. And who is causing and promoting it for millennia, and I don´t mean the male sex drive alone, but to what institutions, that make sex and love punished, abolished, or dominated by crazy, stupid rules full of sexism, hate, and misogyny, its degeneracy has mutated. The faithful creating hell on Earth for multi k years since the neolithic, first agricultural revolution to install bloody dictatorships, what a slogan.
Drugs I don´t know if there are hidden implications and innuendos about Western trade traditions, especially how to get bestselling products into the Chinese market, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_W... I don´t get, but it seems quite probable that there is something deep lurking in the big history meta background. However, even without that, and me overanalyzing and seeing things that aren´t there as if high as heck, it´s always a great trope to get someone insane in the membrane to get the plot started, show ones´ brain on whatever, and how people slowly fall to pieces.
Subjective insecurity This is absolutely not my genre, so my impression and subjective review might be more than incompetent regarding established rating standards, but I definitively like this different, character focused style of storytelling that teaches much about foreign cultures. Hopefully, the writer did his research and it´s accurate, because some reviewers seem to be critical regarding this fact. But, as said, I am an absolute amateur in reading protagonist´ focused stuff and just loved the show.
Some grains of nanotech are sprinkled over a primarily character focused work.
Sci fi plot partly separated from the protagonists' life There are some gSome grains of nanotech are sprinkled over a primarily character focused work.
Sci fi plot partly separated from the protagonists' life There are some good moments of the same quality as one is used from US and UK authors, especially the rare scenes with real sci-fi tech and the research and thriller style conspiracy surrounding it, the rest is European literature business as usual disguised as sci-fi, but mostly character driven stories with their redundancy problems irrelevant to the scientific plot, because no fusion of plot and characters, no real promise, progress, and payoff on the meta and advanced plot level is happening. If I would want to read about average people, I would read books without any fantastic or sci-fi elements, thank you.
Tell me what happens, not how characters feel when it happens So there it is again, the incapability of most European authors to do worldbuilding and do exposition in suspenseful dialogues and action that show the world, character development, etc., while always several elements are combined, switched, and a cool big question in the background with evil entities is waiting to haunt the heroes and make is suspenseful to read.
Please be correct with naming genres. Or just copy and paste good ideas Without Eschbachs´ writing skills and talent, this would be a very average one, so it is an emotional, character introspection driven story with some pieces of Sci-Fi and tropes thrown over and through the whole thing. I really don´t want to be cruel, it´s a solid 4 star, but I don´t get why European authors and publishers define works that have close to nothing to do with real sci-fi as mindboggling milestones of the genre, when just the working concepts of UK and US authors that are writing for decades, some soon a century ago, with great success would have to be copied.
Fantastic realism ruined everything Iain M Banks once said that fantastic realism, I will subjectively add snobbish fringe quality Nobel prize literature attitude, ruined Europe´s sci-fi literature and I couldn´t agree more with that. The few really great authors at the level of the grand English ones aren´t read and the ones who don´t write sci-fi are getting famous and successful in this genre, it´s very, very strange, as if European readers would be afraid of novels that don´t have close to at least 75 percent boring, present day character drivel. ...more
The main character arc is nice but it would have had much more potential for complexity, conspiracies, international conglomerates, world government, The main character arc is nice but it would have had much more potential for complexity, conspiracies, international conglomerates, world government, big money,.. for a whole series.
This is no rant, it´s just a kind of sad truth to me: You see, I am, for years now, just reading not European (excluding the UK) authors, because these are the places where the creative writing courses at universities are that create the ultimate storytellers. But the funny thing is another one: Many Sci-Fi authors create stories without much education in writing, including just their field of interest and specialization. For reasons I don´t understand, this is not working in Europe because, take a look around, there are no authors comparable or just close to the UK and the US. I don´t know what it is, epigenetics, culture, nurture, or something else that makes the same STEM-educated humans in Europe unable to write the unbelievable works of the same writers across the Atlantic or the English Channel.
How it´s done here and there One passage, for instance, describes how the elites react to the impact of the protagonists' wealth, and a US or UK author would have made a whole plotline out of it, maybe starting far earlier in the story, with secret meetings and consequences on real life in small scenes between. European authors stay focused on one character, tell some potentially, wasted plot ideas around her/him, and switch back to the routine of belletristic, absolutely not fantastic storytelling. It somehow works with fantasy a bit, but Sci-Fi is a total wasteland.
Avoidance behavior starts to kick in Sadly I am already so biased that I probably wouldn´t even try new works when there is this stigma surrounding them, because I really tried it and always thought afterward why I didn´t read the fourteenth book of one of my favorite authors or reread one of the classics instead. It´s mostly average storytelling about average people without any Sci-Fi elements, then, from time to time, a perfectly wasted potential comes the way, and the yada yada continues. That´s not what Sci-Fi is made for, that´s totally normal, character-focused literature that is disguised as Sci-Fi and pimped with elements of it.
The only exception I have found so far are the amazing works of Andreas Brandhorst, the only one I would name in a row with the giants of the genre. And Jules Verne.
Mario the lone bookwolf
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Books:
eschbach-andreas
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