Troublesome pacing and go playing

When I think of the work of Shan Sa's I previously read, [b:Empress|815786|Empress|Shan Sa|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1435070236s/815786.jpg|801708], I remember fragments of a voracious dream, the sort of imaginings where the lust for what is already achieved is never sated, and visions of immortality and impregnable fates can never be afforded by mortal means. This was a woman's story I much enjoyed with its sinking into history and pleasing, translated turns of phrase, so when I came across Sa's higher rated work, I couldn't resist. I can see why this work more favorable made its way to the masses with its more recent history, its splicing together brief flits of gendered narrative, its burst of violence and sex culminating in a dramatically brutal, even poetic, ending. Such machinations don't do much for me, however, as I prefer being given time to think upon and puzzle out the blurred out landscapes of prose with slow urges and even slower revenge, rather than being thurst upon a slap dash bang trail of tears and sperm and blood and other watery forms of human waste. While I'm glad that the author, despite hints to the contrary, held off on delving into the events of Nanking, what was written about never rose much above the level of tragedy porn; it wasn't even, for the most part, luridly, beautifully written tragedy porn at that.

The top review of this complains about a board game, which, ok, sure, if you're into that sort of thing. Otherwise, go (why it isn't referred to as yi or weiqi in Chinese-grounded Manchuria is a puzzle, but I suppose it doesn't make for as clever an alliteration) obtusely functions as a useful connector of unlikely bedfellows through the barbed wire borders of gender, nationality, and seriousness of purpose, and if in the end the connective tissue is valued more for what results of said connections than the actual tissue itself, such as been the usual behavior of narratives since the beginning of their oral conception. Moving on from structure to setting, authors will likely never stop picking at WWII and its precursors and successors for narrative foddder, so the trouble comes up when one work has to deal with all those competing at the same trough in order to be considered a truly engaging story. As mentioned previously, I like my fiction slow, or at least passing over a long enough time so that I may grow attached to the characters or the world or the history before it is all torn away and thrown to the winds. Thus I appreciated the factoids dropped every so often about Manchuria and Peking and the changing times of nobility and power reflected in a puppet king country, but I could've used more of this and less high school machinations that, through coincidental international movements, turned deadly in their convolutions. As with the last book I read, this lack of engagement on my part is perhaps a sign of my getting old, but what can I say. You can only pack so much drama and blood in a story that doesn't work very hard to build connections between reader and its world before it gets a little much.

Another lackluster continuum of the remains of 2017's choices, wherein taking a chance on a familiar name didn't pay out as it had elsewhere. It helps to know what one likes and to seek it out accordingly, but there's many an aged cover that I still haven't gotten to on my shelves, and my myriad challenges juxtaposed in overlap with each other were set in hopes of preventing the still untouched old from sinking once again under the weight of shiny surface tension new, so easy to remember and pluck from the stacks when the time is ripe. Four days in and no results handed back, I can't say yet which direction this year is turning towards, although the Time's Up Movement is worthy of being hopeful for. In any case, it's time to pack up and move on, hopefully to more meditative fields than these.

Inequality continues beyond the grave.

An interesting subject - Japanese and Chinese relations during the Manchurian war pre-WWII. That said, the way that the book was written left me wanting more information. There was a lot of beautiful descriptions of the town, the people, their actions, but very little actual character development. it almost felt like an outline of a larger book. Unique in that way, but not my style.

Très beau récit, un peu stressée par les chapitres de trois pages et les phrases de deux mots mais belle découverte
Autour d'un jeu de go se rencontrent une chinoise de la bourgeoisie déchue d'une partie occupée de la Chine et un soldat en civil japonais, donc historique et romantique j'achète

Nicht besonders interessante Geschichte.

Wow... This book was amazing. The writing was so beautiful; elegant, simply, graceful and poignant. The ending was tragic though, and I don't read books like this too often, because the heartache I feel stays with me for a long time. Definitely glad I read it, but wouldn't read it again.

Tellement beau...^^