Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a story told in diary form about a young Chinese man (a student) living in Hong Kong who, at the outset of World War II, has developed tuberculosis and is sent away to recover from the disease at his family's Japanese beach house. There he comes to know the Japanese caretaker of the house, the caretaker's female friend, and a girl who catches his fancy, people from whom we are to believe he has learned life's great lessons. The caretaker is silent, private, kind, and wise. The caretaker's friend is a once-beautiful, gentle, and loving soul, unfortunately sidelined with leprosy and confined to an inhospitable leper colony. And the girl develops a romantic interest in the young man, sealed with a kiss, despite her Japanese father's hatred of the Chinese. Noble creatures all. From the customer reviews, The Samurai's Garden appears to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of book, with the Love-Its weighing in overwhelmingly, if not entirely incomprehensibly: while the book is lacking in every criterion of measurement (writing, research, character development, plot) it's a sad truth that serious fiction has always engendered little public favor here, and for its writers little financial reward. (For those who have not read this book, here's a hint: the serious reviewers (the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, etc.) didn't waste space and ink on this thing.) With The Samurai's Garden, I found book meant not to enlighten but to sell. Add the book's unchallenging style, at most on the seventh-grade reading level, to its heavy dose of schmaltz, and it becomes inescapable that The Samurai's Garden was written with "best seller" twinkling before the eyes of author Tsukiyama, her agent, and her publisher. I was under no preconceptions when I picked up this book; I wanted to like it. Sadly, it disappointed. It is so shallow that you can skate across its surface. Its wobbly premise collapses under the least scrutiny. Its characters have the attributes and the attraction of stick figures. Its dialogue is tediously juvenile. But its most grevious sin is that it is boring. The writing is so flat that it doesn't have a pulse. One of the book's more disconcerting (if not outright funny) features is that Tsukiyama assumed that she could make the narrator (the young guy) a male, but she hasn't the ability to get inside the male head, and so for much of the time that character's aura was hermaphroditic. In terms of poor research, the most egregious example is tuberculosis. From her depiction of TB, I could believe Tsukiyama did no research whatever, as she seems to see living through it then as an extended vacation. On such a vacation, the caretaker meets the young man on his arrival at the train station and has them (the young guy schlepping his suitcases) jogging several miles to the beach house (had the wheel not come to Japan?), and later has the two of them jogging to the leper colony. This is crazy. In fact, TB was one of the leading causes of death during the time period in which the book was set. It had no medicinal cure. Rest -- not marching about -- was crucial to the patient's recovery. TB is highly contagious, is airborne, and spreads rapidly in enclosed spaces. The patient becomes very sick. He is febrile, loses weight, has night sweats, and is crushed by constant fatigue. You get none of this from Tsukiyama. A person with active TB is a serious health menace. That Tsukiyama should have him visit lepers whose immunity is already compromised (!), and for her to have him kiss the uninfected girlfriend (!) is grotesquely irresponsible. There is more. The story's possibilities lie in the ethereal vapor of unrealized hopes. Tsukiyama had the path open to explore differences in Chinese and Japanese cultures, but she didn't. She could have examined what the war meant to the Chinese and the Japanese, but she didn't. She could have enearthed the complexities of the Oriental servant-master relationship, but that was another missed opportunity, as was why the young man had the bizarre notion that the beach house really belonged to the the Japanese caretaker. "The most engaging powers of an author," said Thackery, "are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new." Of all of Tsukiyama's missed opportunities, the blue ribbon must go to her failure to heed this. It would have been lovely to experience the sights, smells, and energy that abounded in Hong Kong and at the Japanese seaside at that time, and how war affected the lives of those affected. It has been claimed that Tsukiyama writes clean, pure lines, which are of a piece of Oriental art. Well, for that matter, the Dick and Jane stories have clean, pure lines. I suspect that the clean, pure lines here are aimed at a targeted best-seller readership.