Where the Wind Takes Us
Translator's Review
I’m not entirely certain of what I just read, but I do know that it wasn’t good. To call it a disappointment would be an understatement. I’ve been a fan of the Guardian of the Spirit series for years, and even produced amateur fan translations for all the untranslated books into English. Sadly, that includes this one. Fortunately, I never have to read or translate anything in it ever again, because I consider my translation to be complete. I hope there will never be another Guardian of the Spirit book, if this is what we have to look forward to.
Previous short story collections--The Wanderer and Those Who Walk the Flame Road--were engaging at best and a bit boring at worst. With the exception of a tiny handful of scenes that could probably fill five to ten pages, all of Where the Wind Takes Us is boring all the way through. Some reviewers and commentators in Japanese have also mentioned the offensive sexual and over-the-top violent content, which will certainly be an issue for some. For me, both the sex and violence were wildly out of character for the characters involved. About halfway through, I ceased seeing Jiguro and Balsa as the characters that I knew from previous books, since they don’t act like themselves at all.
The reasons why Where the Wind Takes Us is objectively a terrible continuation of the series are easy to list: the characters from previous books don’t behave in character, most of the novel involves characters we’ve never seen before, the plot is insipid and would fall apart instantly if the “secret” were revealed early, and the setting and history of Rota doesn’t match previous established canon. It feels like a fantasy novel set in an entirely different world with entirely different characters. To that end, I intend to analyze this book as both a series continuation and an independent novel. It’s not interesting to read as either one, but billing it as original fiction apart from the series might make it more palatable to some readers.
Strap in: spoilers ahead.
Plot Summary & Analysis
The autumn after Guardian of Heaven and Earth concludes, Balsa and Tanda visit Rota at the Herb Market. Some guards attack a musician in the market, and Balsa saves her and her companions. These musicians are known as Sadan Taram, which translates to “wind musicians.” Balsa reveals that she and Jiguro traveled with them in the past, and the Sadan Taram wish her to guard them on a new journey. Tanda helps an injured Sadan Taram man, Gamal, make it back to his home, so he is not present for the journey.
Balsa’s previous journey with the Sadan Taram takes place twenty years previously, and is presented as a flashback. Sadan Taram travel from place to place to soothe spirits of people who died on battlefields. One of the locations they visit is called the Valley of the Forest King, which is considered both dangerous and haunted. Balsa and Jiguro guard the Sadan Taram as they travel; at each new location, an attack is sprung by mysterious assassins who are later revealed to be working for a Rotan clan lord. Jiguro has a sexual relationship with Sari, the leader of the Sadan Taram, which (according to Sari) results in Eona, the future leader of the Sadan Taram, whom Balsa guards in the more recent timeline.
Sari, and later Eona, are being targeted by assassins sent by the lord of the Magua clan. The base of the clan’s power is in northern Rota. They don’t want the Sadan Taram to visit the Valley of the Forest King, because if they do, they’ll uncover a secret. The spirit that resides in the valley is named Lagaro; he was a great hero of the Tahsa people. (Readers of previous books, please note that the Tahsa people and the Tal people are not the same and share no history or characteristics.) After an earthquake, Lagaro’s body is exposed to the elements, and there are tell-tale signs of death by poisoning on his bones. The Magua clan was responsible for this death many generations ago, and if the secret comes out, they’ll have to pay reparations to the remaining Tahsa people. The Magua clan is actively trying to suppress the Tahsa people in the province where they rule, so they can’t allow this to happen.
In both the past and present timelines, the leader of the Sadan Taram is targeted by assassins from the Magua clan. Balsa manages to convince the few remaining Tahsa people and the Magua clan to work together instead of fighting. She tells them to expose the secret of Lagaro’s death--which, after all, happened centuries ago--and to promote peace between both sides. This done, Balsa returns to New Yogo and Tanda just before the weather worsens in the winter of the year.
Those are the basic outlines of the plot. The Tahsa people and Magua clan representatives are all named, of course, but their involvement in the actual story is so slight, and their characterization is so limited, that they might as well be cardboard cutouts talking to Balsa. Rumina, a descendant of both the Tahsa people and the Magua clan, is given a lot of pages as a young woman who’s recently lost her mother, but her grief is generic and has no impact except to make her more receptive to Balsa’s idea. Kumu, Rumina’s younger brother, is an appallingly obnoxious racist obsessed with blood purity and restoring the Tahsa people to their former glory. Many of the chapters written from perspectives that aren’t Balsa have this racism on full and glorious display, presenting “pure-blooded” Rotans as ideal on one side and indigenous supremacy on the other. One might argue that this treatment of a theme is topical, given the increasing radicalization in the world over the last decade, but when both sides are equally hateful, it’s hard to root for either one of them. The reconciliation between the Magua clan and the Tahsa people feels forced because it is. If they did actually hate one another that much, a few weeks of peace talks weren’t likely to change anyone’s minds.
Characterization and Setting
There are very few characters from the previous books in this novel. The canon characters that appear in some capacity are Balsa, Tanda, Jiguro, and Kaina. Everyone else is relegated to off-screen mentions, including Chagum, about whom we learn little, and Torogai, about whom we learn nothing. Fan favorite Rotan characters like the Kashal and Ihan make no appearances. The Tal people are mentioned exactly once, in Uehashi’s restructuring of the history of Rotarbal. Asra and Chikisa are not even mentioned.
Of course, this doesn’t need to be a problem. Readers picking up a Guardian of the Spirit book should be thrilled to read more about Balsa and Jiguro. And there are a few cute, clever scenes scattered here and there. For the most part, though, the Rota that Jiguro and Balsa travel through is nothing like the one from Guardian of the God, Guardian of Heaven and Earth, or The Wanderer, and in most cases actively contradicts previous canon. Retroactively adding the Sadan Taram into Rotan history is particularly heinous (not to mention dull); no effort is made to fit them into the development of Rota from Rotarbal. How the Sadan Taram fared during the rule of Sada Talhamaya, or how they managed to survive afterward--none of this is presented here. They seem to have had no role to play at all, but simply developed out of nowhere, complete with contradictory lore that takes pages upon pages of infodumps to explain. Rather than using the previous setting, Uehashi makes up a new and less compelling one, and the edges of that conceit show through fairly quickly.
Worse, Balsa and Jiguro are often unrecognizable as characters. Jiguro taking a lover is uncharacteristic in and of itself, and Uehashi makes no attempt to explain it except that Sari is “pretty” with “beautiful eyes.” There’s a scene where Balsa and Jiguro capture a few attackers and hold them for questioning--this is fine--but then Jiguro commands Balsa to break her unconscious captive’s arm, and she complies. Jiguro holds a knife less than an inch from the man’s eye and interrogates him in a scene so chilling that it belongs in Dexter, not a Guardian of the Spirit book. The fact that Jiguro doesn’t cut out the man’s eye and tells Balsa to splint the arm she broke doesn’t fix the scene. It makes Jiguro look like a stone-cold killer and torturer, without a trace of humanity anywhere left in him. It’s hard to understand why Balsa would love him, and easy to think that she would only stay with him out of fear.
Balsa doesn’t fare much better, especially in her younger incarnation. She and Eona have parallel crises of competence. In Eona’s case, this is warranted; she does nothing in the story except be attacked and get poisoned. In Balsa’s case, it’s entirely unwarranted. She is frightened that she won’t be able to protect Jiguro--seeming to forget that Jiguro can protect himself just fine--and of course, when the time comes, she has no trouble fighting off the bad guys and saving the day. Reducing Balsa to someone so fearful and spineless, even for a scene, does not ring true, and it gets even worse when the Sadan Taram get involved.
Throughout the novel, Balsa is pursued by Gamal, Sari’s younger half-brother, as a sexual partner. Balsa flatly refuses to sleep with him, but he and the other Sadan Taram are all presented as sexually promiscuous and even crude. This wouldn’t be so bad if they were all adults, but Gamal propositions Balsa for sex when she is sixteen years old. I had no liking for the Sadan Taram before that, but after that scene, I found myself wishing they’ll all wind up dead in a ditch somewhere.
The Sadan Taram as characters are mostly given a single trait to represent their entire personality. Sari is pretty, Gamal is coarse, Kii is an annoying twit, Sansa is a world-wise motherly figure. Music doesn’t play an important role in their lives--there are only two Sadan Taram songs in the entire book--so it’s hard to see them as musicians. They play music at times, but the performances Balsa narrates are mostly circus acts with musical props.
The other original characters in the novel are also defined by a single trait. Rumina is grieving, her brother is a raging racist (which could describe several characters), her uncle is world-weary, her grandfather is hateful, her parents are kind... you get the idea. None of these characters act like real people, and there’s nothing even remotely interesting about any of them.
For all that, the original characters in the novel take up three times as much space as previous canon characters, like Balsa. In a four hundred and fifty page novel, approximately three hundred pages deals with new characters and an entirely new setting. As a capstone to a series, this novel fails spectacularly on every level: plot, characterization, setting, and thematic elements. It’s so boring that it should be a crime, except when it pulls a scene of raw sexuality or violence out of the tedium.
Stand-Alone Novel?
In the author’s afterword, Uehashi Nahoko claims that Where the Wind Takes Us was partially prompted by the death of her mother. She identifies the theme of grief and links this novel thematically to Guardian of the Darkness. This connection may seem apt on its surface--both novels do show Balsa grieving Jiguro, to a greater or lesser extent, and there are obvious mother and daughter relationships that get thorough treatment throughout. Far more interesting would have been a treatment of Balsa’s grief over her own long-lost mother, or a return to her aunt in Kanbal, preferably with Tanda in tow. Balsa doesn’t mention her mother even once. The main thrust of the plot doesn’t affect Balsa; as far as she’s concerned, she is repeating her past history with nothing new added, and she’s already grieved Jiguro. The story is rehash twice.
As a novel narrated partially by Balsa, this simply can’t work. But what if this were a novel narrated entirely by the original characters, with Balsa almost entirely cut out? Would it work then?
No, sadly. The main problem is in the chapter “Jitan at Dawn,” where Balsa spends interminable pages hearing about maharan wood trade from Kaina, an information dealer. As a translator, I had to tease out every word, and managed to find out most of the secret that drives the plot two hundred pages early. Only the motive for the assassination attempts--that Lagaro was assassinated, and that his body shows it--was left to discover, and that revelation was left to the very end, so that no one could guess prematurely. The death of a hero hundreds of years before shouldn’t have such an outsize effect on the present--who cares about their great-great-great-great grandfather?--but perhaps Japanese culture, with a stronger emphasis on ancestor veneration, might have a better contextual frame. Or perhaps the Magua clan and the Tahsa people were always going to fight, and Lagaro was a figurehead or an excuse for them to oppose one another.
By any measure, Lagaro is not a compelling addition to the series. His death is portrayed and nothing else. His death is shown as a tragic accident, and his decision to hide the cause is presented as heroic, but he performs no other heroic deeds. He is cardboard, like the rest of the original characters are cardboard, and the series would be better off without him in it. Without him, the rest of the plot falls completely apart.
Where the Wind Takes Us is not a Guardian of the Spirit novel--or at least, it’s not a good one. It’s also not a good stand-alone novel on its own merits. Do yourself the world’s biggest favor and don’t waste your time with it.
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