Review: The Samurai's Octopus

 

What if … Charles Dickens were not a name synonymous with Victorian London, but were transplanted instead to 18^th century Edo (Tokyo)? You might wind up with something like Jonelle Patrick’s triumphant new novel, The Samurai’s Octopus.

It’s not written in Dickens’s style of course. Patrick’s style is all her own, lucid and sharp-edged as Japanese calligraphy. But it’s Dickensian in subject matter, and in two of its central elements: the scope of character and passion, and the way each character’s fate is ruled by the dead hand of the past.

The past is centered upon one event: murder. The opening presents us with the four classic elements of the murder mystery: the murderer, the victim, the motive for which the murder committed—and the witness. We see the crime through the eyes of the witness, Takahisa Takeda, the impecunious samurai of the title. But he doesn’t know the murderer, the victim, or the motivation. He’ll spend the next sixteen years of his life trying to fill in the blanks. His fortune depends upon the answers.

The story is set in Yoshiwara, the prostitute’s quarter of Edo, only a few square blocks in area. But in Patrick’s hands it’s a self-contained world, as fully realized as Arrakis or Middle Earth, a world of pageantry and petty jealousies, intrigue and illusion, peopled by an entire society, from high to low, samurais to shipbuilders to officialdom, courtesans, fortunetellers, and the ragtag of children, the by-blows of chance encounters and forbidden loves. If you’re thinking of Fagin’s band of pickpockets, you’re on the right track.

And our Oliver Twist is Birdie, an orphan girl on the cusp of adulthood, attendant to the star courtesan of the quarter. She’s in line to become her successor. But she has blanks of her own to fill in: who are her parents? Why was she abandoned to a brothel? She’ll move heaven and earth to find the answers.

She does exactly that.

The stories of Birdie and Takeda move around one another in a dance as formal yet vigorous as a galliard at an Elizabethan court, coming ever closer till they close and intertwine. When the music stops, you’ll want a breather. But you’ll be looking forward to the next dance.

And how does the titular octopus fit in? It’s the very heart of the novel. But I’ll leave it to you to discover how. Get this book. Now.