Takashi Matsuoka: Cloud of Sparrows

By MARGIE THOMSON

Because of its setting - Japan in the age of samurai and bushido - Cloud of Sparrows will inevitably be compared with James Clavell's Shogun. It certainly shares the undercurrent of extreme violence, with sweet high notes of geisha elegance and romance, but Sparrows is a more tightly focused novel: most of it takes place within the span of 1861, a time of enormous upheaval as, after 261 years of isolation, the West is once again pounding at Japan's harbour cities, insisting on being let in to trade and to proselytise.

Whereas Shogun was set around 1600, Matsuoka has zoomed ahead to what is really the birth of modern Japan, and has chosen as his dominant theme the clash of these two mighty cultures in an arena of almost total mutual ignorance.

Now, just seven years after the American Commander Perry brought a squadron of warships into Yokohama Harbour and demanded the country's ports be opened to Western trade, the 1000-year-old samurai culture is already on its knees.

Guns are replacing swords and Christian missionaries are afoot. "The outsiders were a deadly pollution ... Their very presence caused the ancient ways to deteriorate with shocking rapidity," one character muses.

As our story opens, three Christian missionaries arrive in Edo, the beautiful, two million-strong city. Emily, just 16 and engaged to the perpetually Bible-quoting Rev Zephaniah Cromwell, has come to the right place: tormented by her own golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty, which has brought her nothing but trouble in America, she discovers freedom for the first time in a land that considers her hideous.

Travelling with them is Brother Matthew Stark, whose past is as gory as some of the Samurai he's about to meet. His belief that revenge will bring him peace, and his lightning-fast gun skills, quickly wins him the respect of our story's hero, Genji Lord of Akoaka, of the fictional clan Okumichi.

Genji is the bridge between two cultures: embued in the samurai culture, he nevertheless has the breadth of mind to recognise the inevitability of change, and to be made curious by the newcomers, whom he hosts in his Edo palace.

While a minor lord within the Shogun system of clan rivalry and allegiance, he nevertheless has status and mystique because of his family's powers of foresight, a clever device that somehow fits snugly within the novel's frame, and allows us to keep in mind the various endpoints of the conflict we are witnessing.

Genji has visions of a future where neither kimonos nor topknots nor samurai swords are worn; his crazed uncle has nightmarish visions of what we know to be the future annihilation of World War 11.

Genji is in love with the beautiful geisha Heiko, but in the heated environment of the era nobody is what they seem, and the price for trusting the wrong person will inevitably be high - and bloody.

An assassination attempt, followed by the cannon attack on Edo by French and British warships lying in the harbour, escalate inter-clan tensions within the Shogun's domain and send Genji and his clan, and the missionaries, off on a perilous journey to his own domain, away from the dangers of Edo. There is much destruction - of human life (the pages are in places littered with gore, severed heads, limbs etc), of allegiances, of custom.

Despite the stereotypical characters - the beautiful geisha, the handsome lord, the ruthless samurai, the spy, the naive missionary - we nevertheless become fond of Matsuoka's large cast of characters, none of whom is quite what they seem on first meeting.

Matsuoka has a graceful touch, and a most Japanese sensibility. His detailing can be beautiful, as for instance when Heiko notices the light dusting of morning snow on a single bare branch of a cherry tree.

To begin with, I was grappling with the characters' names, working hard to keep them in their place; by the end I was finding all sorts of excuses not to have to reach the last page and leave this complex, fascinating world.

Bantam

$34.95