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The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria: A Novel (Sano Ichiro Novels 7) Kindle Edition
In The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria, Laura Joh Rowland once again has written a book in which "an exotic setting, seventeenth-century Japan, and a splendid mystery...make for grand entertainment" (New York Daily News).
In the carefully ordered world of seventeenth-century Japan, the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter is a place where men of all classes can drink, revel, and enjoy the favors of beautiful courtesans. But on a cold winter's dawn, Sano Ichiro--the shogun's Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People--must visit Yoshiwara on a most unpleasant mission.
Within a house of assignation reserved for the wealthiest, most prominent men, a terrible murder has occurred. In a room that reeks of liquor and sex, the shogun's cousin and heir, Lord Mitsuyoshi, lies dead, a flowered hairpin embedded in his eye, in the bed of the famous courtesan, Lady Wisteria.
The shogun demands quick justice, but Sano's path is blocked by many obstacles, including the disappearance of Wisteria and her pillow book, a diary that may contain clues. The politics of court life, the whims of the shogun, and interference by his long time rival, Edo's Chief Police Commissioner Hoshina, also hinder Sano in his search for the killer. Sano's wife, Lady Reiko, is eager to help him, but he fears what she may uncover. When suspicion of murder falls upon Sano himself, he must find the real murderer to solve the case and clear his name.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMinotaur Books
- Publication dateApril 1, 2007
- File size666 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria introduces readers into Yoshiwara, the well-ordered but cruel pleasure quarter of 17th-century Edo (Tokyo), where the corpse of Lord Mitsuyoshi is found sprawled on a bed. The woman with whom he'd spent his final hours, a top-ranking courtesan known as Lady Wisteria, has disappeared, along with her private journal, which might supply clues to her complicity in this slaying. In the absence of both, and with the capricious old shogun ordering that Mitsuyoshi's family not be quizzed about his death, Sano is left to look for assassins among the courtesan's attendants and prominent clients. Meanwhile, Sano's enemies vie for credit in solving the murder (even if they must pin it on Sano), a woman's headless body is found wearing Wisteria's kimono, and Sano's amateur investigator wife, Reiko, threatens to discover the link between her samurai and the enigmatic prostitute.
Laura Joh Rowland cooks up wonderfully knotty plots. Yet it's her renderings of Sano's world--with its Machiavellian politics, exotic fashions, and hierarchical communities--that make her series particularly interesting. Although this seventh installment lacks the cinematic violence of its immediate predecessor, Black Lotus, it still makes you glad to be observing shogunate Japan from afar. --J. Kingston Pierce
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Like the big, sprawling novels of James Clavell, the Sano Ichiro mysteries are full of captivating detail, with lively characters and solid stories.” ―Booklist
“Delicate prose and a plot full of the overtones and undercurrents that shade real life push Rowland's latest historical beyond the standard whodunit.” ―Publishers Weekly
From the Back Cover
In feudal Japan, passion and secrets lead to murder. . .
From A Remote, Exotic World. . .
Sano Ichiro, Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People, awakens from a turbulent dream into a real-life nightmare. Lord Matsudaira Mitsuyoshi, the shogun's cousin and heir, has been murdered after a night of debauchery in the city's pleasure quarter...
Comes A Danger All Too Close To Home. . .
The matter requires Sano's personal attention-more personal than Sano at first imagines. For he soon discovers that Mitsuyoshi's companion for the evening was none other than the alluring Lady Wisteria, a woman whom Sano himself once knew intimately before he was married to his beloved wife, Reiko. But the memory of Wisteria still stirs him, and it is with both dismay and relief that he learns she has vanished along with her pillow book, a diary that may contain valuable clues. The circumstances trouble him, as does the possibility that he and Wisteria might meet again with dangerous consequences. . .
"Like the big, sprawling novels of James Clavell, the Sano Ichiro mysteries are full of captivating detail, with lively characters and solid stories."
-Booklist
"Delicate prose and a plot full of the overtones and undercurrents that shade real life push Rowland's latest historical beyond the standard whodunit."
--Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Laura Joh Rowland is the granddaughter of Chinese and Korean immigrants. She grew up in Michigan and was educated at the University of Michigan, where she graduated with a B.S. in microbiology and a master's degree in public health. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, Marty, and their three cats. Her previous novels include Black Lotus, The Samurai's Wife, The Concubine's Tattoo, and Shinju, all of which feature the samurai-detective Sano Ichiro.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FA5QL8
- Publisher : Minotaur Books; 1st edition (April 1, 2007)
- Publication date : April 1, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 666 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 368 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1250055482
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,210,734 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #249 in Historical Japanese Fiction
- #5,248 in Historical Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Fiction
- #5,794 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Laura Joh Rowland is the author of A Mortal Likeness, the second book in her mystery series set in Victorian England, starring photographer Sarah Bain. The third book, coming out in January 2019, is The Hangman’s Secret. Her other series features 17th-century Japanese samurai detective Sano Ichiro. Her work has been published in 21 countries, won RT Magazine’s Reader’s Choice Award, and made The Wall Street Journal’s list of the five best historical mystery novels. Laura holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Michigan. She is a former aerospace scientist, a painter, and a cartoonist. She lives in New York City with her husband Marty. Visit her website at www.laurajohrowland.com
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Sano Ichiro, the Shogun's detective, is constantly having to battle with the inane Shogun who cannot make a decision. He is constantly fearing that maybe TODAY he will be slain by the Shogun for some slight. While certainly life and death were never a sure thing back in those days, to go through 7 books worth of top notch paranoia gets to wear on you a bit. You really don't think that he WILL be killed of course, any more than you think James Bond will finally catch that bullet. But in Bond movies the tension is managed and believable, where here you would think at least Sano would have come to accept with quiet stoicism the situation he's in.
I was very happy that this book was only 3 months after the last one (story time wise) so that we could see more development of the relationship between Sano and his wife, Reiko, who caused him so much trouble (and yet helped as well) in the last situation. I love to see character development and growth in stories and series. Yes, now Reiko was not as self assured, which in my book is a good thing. She's gotten a bit more mature. Or has she? She seems to still throw tantrums, leaping from one wild assumption to another with great rapidity. Sano lies to her and their reconciliation is very forced.
The issue at hand is a relative of the Shogun's who has been slain, and a concubine - Lady Wisteria - now missing. She's an ex lover of Sano's. Sano of course doesn't tell his wife this, the Shogun waffles on what must be done, and Yanagisawa's buddy Hashina causes trouble at every turn. Throw into the mix that Midori wants to marry Hirata, and that Yanagisawa's wife wants to be friends. Or does she?
Even after all of this time I find it hard to really empathize with some of the characters. Hashina is the stereotypical "clueless young bachelor". Midori is the stereotypical "madly in love and willing to try all sorts of stupid tricks to get her man" chick with less than half a brain. I am happy that the "every character has a peverse sexual hobby" style has been toned down. I don't mind sex. I just find it a bit excessive when it's every single character. Of course this episode was set in a whorehouse town, so you have to expect some.
The twists and turns were fun, although far too similar to a certain previous book. Also, I found the Lady Yanagisawa situation to be VERY unbelievable. There was no justification at all given why Yanagisawa - a man very much attuned to beauty and intelligence - would purposefully choose a very ugly woman with few brains, use her to get a kid, but then abandon her - knowing how much harm she could cause to him with the information she has access to. To be honest, with the way she was introduced I wanted a much more complex story there, but it petered out with both not much "meaning" at all - and I found the ending sequence involving the child to be extremely disturbing. I'm sure of course that is why it was put in - instead of coming up with more and more bizarre sex situations, the author had to find something new to "disturb" us. Surely this wasn't really necessary, though.
In general I love the ambiance and mood, it's why I keep coming back. I wish the characters were more rounded, more "settled" in their world. I wish the story was written from a 1600s point of view, instead of modern day morality being pressed onto 1600s situations. I wish the in story connections made more "sense" in the story, instead of clues dropping from the sky and revelations doing likewise. Maybe those will come from future books, as the characters mature.
Like other reviewers, I felt that the series had fallen into an enjoyable rut as it progressed, with Sano locked in ever more nasty feuding with his nemesis, Yanigasawa, the shogun's chamberlain, and Yanigasawa's lover, Hashina. By providing a less baroque mystery to solve--just the murder of the shogun's heir in a Yoshiwara brothel and the subsequent disappearance of the newly re-enslaved Wisteria--Rowland focuses the book more effectively than she did in <i>Black Lotus</i> or several of the earlier books. Here, the danger to Sano and his small clan (his wife, Reiko, their son, Masahiro, his retainer, Hirata, and Hirata's beloved, Midori) is fairly straitforward--though sources of that danger are often unexpected. People whom a longtime reader might assume to be on the Sano team's side turn out to be less than trustworthy, and foes who one thought one could count on to do the wrong thing don't--at least, they don't <b>always</b>. Rowland handles the multiple plots more assuredly than she has in some earlier books, including the star-crossed courtship of Hirarata and Midori and Reiko's unexpected, dangerous new frienship with Lady Yanigasawa.
The characters and their relationships continue to grow from book to book in unanticipated ways--Sano and Reiko are both suffering deep crises of self-confidence after their Phyrric victory over the Black Lotus sect in the previous volume. Hirata and Midori, having finally come together in Black Lotus show a depth of resolve--if not desperation--in drawning their mutually distrustful families together. Even Yanigasawa has grown--no longer the paper-thin villain, obsessed with destroying Sano.
Of course, Hashina has now taken over much of the chamberlain's vitriol, and the most tiresome parts of the book (for me at least) involved Hashina and Sano's bitter feuding for the shogun's support. It's a sequence we've seen before in this series, and while Rowland handles the scene and its aftermath well, I was ready to move on far sooner than she allowed me to do. Also, there is a sequence in which a child is placed at risk that passed my comfort zone--I'm the parent of young children, and the author crossed the line where I could willing suspend my disbelief. My problem, I know, but there you are.
As with most of the books in this series, the killer is revealed well before the end of the book, so the resolution shifts the book from the detective to the thriller sub-genre. However, Rowland keeps some twists and turns right up to the end, to make sure to keep things interesting.