I have not had the best track record when it comes to Asian-inspired modern fantasy stories. I was underwhelmed by Fonda Lee’s Jade City and Jade War, and reading R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War was so disappointing that I took a one-year break from the sub-genre. To motivate myself to try again, I decided to pick up The Sword of Kaigen, by M.L. Wang, often praised by readers as their favourite fantasy standalone novel, period. Sadly, as I read my way through this story of a small warrior village in a Japan-esque nation, I started to realize that I was heading for disappointment again and wondered if there’s something about me and Asian-inspired fantasy that don’t quite mix. Having grown up with bedtime stories of Chinese folktales and legends, I’ve always been fascinated by Asian stories filled with magic, but there’s something that doesn’t seem to be working.

The Sword of Kaigen focuses on a central family — the Matsuda family — particularly the mother, Misaki, and her son, Mamoru. We follow Mamoru as a teenage student for a while, and also flash back to Misaki’s life when she was only slightly older than Mamoru. The main story focuses on an attack on their village, as part of a larger conflict between nations. After the battles, we experience the grief, trauma and struggles of these characters as they recover and rebuild. I think most fans of this book enjoy, and perhaps admire, Misaki as a character. Others may be fascinated by the Asian-inspired world and its elemental magic system (which is a lot like the “benders” from the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender, and its sequel, Avatar: The Legend of Korra). Certain types of people (called “theonites” in this book) are able to generate and manipulate the elements, such as ice/water (which is what the Matsudas do), or wind/air, or fire. My favourite part of the book were the battle scenes, where theonites would use these powerful abilities to fight in amazing ways. Matsuda power-moves included creating a dragon of ice to attack their enemies and a signature move known as “The Whispering Blade” (which you can probably imagine what it does). These action scenes were described very well and were pretty thrilling. It was fun to visualize all the interesting and inventive attacks and battles (a lot like watching an episode of Avatar). If the bulk of this story had been full of these kind of scenes, I would have enjoyed this book a lot more. 

A lot of my issues with the book result from what seemed to be messy/sloppy world-building. I am a huge fan of world-building, so if you can create a cohesive, unique and interesting world, you have me regardless of whether your characters or plot are the best. The most puzzling aspect to me was how this pseudo-Japanese nation seemed to be at a level of technology that ranged all the way from feudal/medieval all the way to modern/digital. The main village is ruled by local nobles (the Matsudas) and sword-fighting is the highest discipline. However, we also hear about how Mamoru has a kind of “summer job” helping to build a telecom tower (which I imagine is like a cell tower) for use with telecom devices (maybe smartphones). There is also mention of television and of fighter jet planes. Granted, for most of the book the modern technologies are not mentioned, but they are still part of this world and often made me wonder why people stay with the “old ways” when more modern technology could have helped them live better. Even ignoring these anachronisms, I also disliked how the language of this world used actual Japanese (from our world) words and phrases alongside made-up words in the new languages created by the author. It was very confusing. While I normally think it’s interesting when authors make up new terminology to give added dimension to the world-building, it felt disjointed how Wang created new words for the most key terms (e.g. jijaka is the word for the ice manipulating theonites at the centre of the story) and only the most trivial words, such as units of time. Why was it a good idea to tell me how many “dinma” something took? I couldn’t understand whether that’s a long time or a short time. It just makes things more confusing. 

The writing also didn’t work for me in how shallow it seemed, especially the character parts. With the tragedy of a war, there is bound to be emotional scenes and readers are meant to feel a lot of empathy for the characters. However, Wang seemed to carry that off in an unsophisticated way, and ended up writing very obvious and manipulative scenes. There was one scene memorably frustrating scene where Misaki encounters an enemy fighter who is standing on the neck of a female artisan (i.e. innocent civilian) while her daughters and newborn infant have been murdered by him right nearby. It’s such a heavy-handed way to demonize the enemies as monsters that rather than make me empathize with Misaki and the Kaigenese, I ended up breaking connection with the story and the characters altogether.

I could also go on about how Misaki’s backstory as an urban crime fighter felt completely out of place and feels like it was forcibly stitched into the main story. Also, because of the way the story fell into different sections, the overall character arcs felt abrupt and rushed. Often characters would just reveal a secret about their personalities that surprised the other characters until they accepted that this was the truth of that character all this time. That bothered me related to Misaki and her chauvinist husband. In any case, the world-building did not compensate for the weaknesses in plot or characterization, and the characters could not make up for the inadequate world-building.

Sadly, I cannot really understand why so many people love this book so much. It told a moderately enjoyable story with a likeable protagonist in Misaki, but it was still mediocre overall. Being Asian myself, I had hoped to read a cool, Asian-inspired fantasy story that moved me, made me proud, and left me amazed. Sadly, this was not the one.

3 stars

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