murasaki's Full Review: Sujata Massey - The Samurai's Daughter
The Samurai’s Daughter is Sujata Massey’s sixth Rei Shimura mystery. Throughout the series, Rei is a half-Japanese American citizen living in Tokyo, Japan, trying to support herself as an antiques dealer. Rei has an on-again-off-again relationship with a Scots lawyer, Hugh Glendinning, who had reappeared in Rei’s life during the fifth novel, The Bride’s Kimono. Rei, like various fictional characters, has an amazing capacity for stumbling onto crime scenes and then pursuing leads to satisfy her own curiosity.
The Plot
Rei returned with her parents at the end of The Bride’s Kimono to the family home in San Francisco for a much-needed vacation over the holidays. During the month between the close of the last book and the opening of The Samurai’s Daughter, Rei has started working on a history of the Shimura family, cataloging the items that had been passed down to her father as the oldest son. Hugh Glendinning arrives right before Christmas to get to know Rei’s parents just when Rei and her father’s relationship has become strained due to her poking around rattling skeletons and the addition of a houseguest, Manami, a Japanese exchange student in the pathology program of the university where Rei’s father works as a psychiatrist.
Hugh, meanwhile, is working on a class action suit to sue Japanese conglomerates and gather depositions from witnesses who were forced into slave labor for Japanese companies during World War II or sent to brothels as “comfort women,” or prostitutes, for Japanese soldiers. Rei accompanies Hugh to take one of the witnesses some food and a teakettle, a witness that later winds up dead, apparently from natural causes. Rei has other suspicions, especially when, after returning to Tokyo, another of Hugh’s witnesses is attacked and goes into a coma.
Elements of Style
The Samurai’s Daughter is Massey’s most overtly political novel to date. Although Massey has dealt with the subtleties of racism and xenocentrism in Japanese culture in previous novels, The Samurai’s Daughter is a clear indictment of the Japanese government for its failure to not only pay reparations for the enslavement of Korean, Filippino, and other Asian minorities as hard laborers for Japanese companies and empressing women into prostitution, but also Japan’s failure to acknowledge their responsibility for these atrocious human rights violations. As a capstone, Massey also brings in the Japanese government’s denial that the Nanking massacre even happened.
If I had not lived in Japan myself and gone through experiences that parallel Rei’s, such as counter-culture shock and counter-counter-culture shock, I might not have gotten as much out of this novel as I did. When I first went to Japan as an exchange student, I underwent culture shock but emerged from it with a love for Japan and all things Japanese, as well as a deepened sense of appreciation and patriotism for the United States, my home country. My initial culture shock was miniscule compared to the counter-culture shock of returning to the United States after a year away, an experience that made me in many respects very cynical about American society and idealistic about Japanese culture. Rei undergoes a similar experience in The Bride’s Kimono, when she first returns to the United States after living in Japan for five years. I returned to Japan several years later; the second time, Japanese culture seemed much more transparent to me, and I was more aware of the problems in their society. And, as a result of seeing ugly American abroad syndrome writ large in the military population of Okinawa, I once again left Japan for the United States, a lot more enlightened about two cultures and about human beings, loving both cultures a little less, having viewed both of them more clearly.
During Rei’s return to Japan and her delving into her family history, she learns things about her family that may have affected World War II and 20th century Japanese imperialism. (I would also argue that Japan practiced political imperialism for the first half of the 20th century; since then, Japan has practiced economic imperialism.) Because of Hugh’s class action suit, the information she uncovers about her ancestors, and being able to see more clearly some of the (not necessarily innocuous) motivations behind Japanese culture, Rei loses some of her tendency to idealize Japan. Her very behavior, the short temper, striking at people closest to her, bound up with everything else, indicate that Rei is undergoing the frustrations of counter-counter-culture shock.
Nitpicks
Although I loved the story as it unfolded and even the mystery elements were not completely predictable, I have to wonder if Massey’s editor even bothered to proofread the manuscript. I expect every book I pick up to have three typos; more than that annoys me. This novel had at least five typos: unclosed or unopened quotes, extra words that should have been deleted, misspellings, inappropriate word choice. Additionally, not all of the action in the novel flowed; it was rather jarring when a scene started in the kitchen and suddenly we’re in the dining room with no idea how we got there. This happened more than once and could have been easily fixed by one-sentence transitions in several instances. I don’t blame the author so much as I do the editor for failing to catch the mistakes--I’ve seen similar things slip past editors of experienced and frequently published authors, as though they assume the authors are no longer fallible.
Overall
I am quite pleased that Massey decided to infuse The Samurai’s Daughter with a political viewpoint that works well mediated through Rei’s counter- and counter-counter-culture shock. I am curious to know if other readers who have not lived in Japan picked up the same nuances as I did, and I hope that, after reading this review and the book, more readers who have not traveled abroad themselves will be attuned to the subtleties of moving in and out of different cultures.
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