Hearn has once again crafted an exquisite fictional environment, with characters, societies, and an omnipresent natural environment that all ring true.

In the final installment of the series, Takeo seeks once and for all to legitimize his claim to the house of Otori, just as Kaede seeks to do the same with the western lands surrounding Maruyama. Standing in their way are just about all the current political and military powers, not to mention those elements of the Tribe that have sworn to assassinate Takeo. On their side are disgruntled warriors, some pirates, farmers, and the Hidden.

As in the previous volumes, Hearn’s fictional landscape is a wonderful creation. The land and the culture of the people living on it are intertwined, and Takeo and Kaede must come to terms with their physical environment no less than the socio-political. Rivers, typhoons, the coming winter, and even earthquakes are all real actors in this drama.

Also quite intriguing are Takeo’s alliance-building negotiations and compromises. Hearn builds some wonderful tension as Takeo seeks to accept the services of the Hidden, who are “untouchables” from the point of view of the rest of his military alliance. His final encounter with Jo-An, his main contact with the Hidden, is horribly poignant.

For her part, Kaede sees the downside of political struggle. An old nemesis gains the upper hand for a while, and Kaede, humiliated, becomes an object of scorn. Her trials are an interesting reminder that capture can bring any story to a devestating halt.

Unfortunately, the two main threads in the story are both resolved with the help of a highly improbable deus ex machina that weakens the storytelling considerably. Until the conclusion of this final volume, Hearn’s plotting seemed fairly organic to the story, but the coincidences involved in bringing this episode to a tidy conclusion are too far-fetched.

—August 3, 2005

Most interesting in this volume are their struggles to find personal fulfillment and a larger social good in the context of their families’ social place and ambitions. Both seek to find and cling to the strengths in their heritage while discarding the weaknesses. It’s the discarding that’s tough. Takeo struggles with the Tribe’s amoral quest for self-preservation, while Kaede is stymied by the woman’s traditional role among the nobility.

Hearn also devotes some attention to religious tension. Mainstream religion in Takeo’s society is polytheistic, combining elements of animism and ancestor worship. Takeo’s early childhood, however, was spent among The Hidden, whose monotheistic pacifism is anathema to the ruling class. In a pivotal scene, he meets a hermit prophetess whose prophecy about his future haunts him and who seems to embrace all religions: “It is all one. Keep this in your heart. It is all one.” Still, the various creeds conflict in Takeo’s heart, and Hearn has a deft touch depicting Takeo sometimes using religion as a political expedient and sometimes meditating seriously on the core of Truth.

Hearn has once again crafted an exquisite fictional environment, with characters, societies, and an omnipresent natural environment that all ring true.

—August 3, 2005