James Nicoll Reviews

Brave Story
Miyuki Miyabe (Trans. Alexander O. Smith)
VIZ/Haikasoru
$16.99 USA/$23.00 CAN/£9.99
816 pages
ISBN: 978 – 1421527734

This begins with a Weird Crap Accumulates plot that gets run over an entirely mundane crisis and then moves on from there:

Timid, self-doubting fifth grader Wataru Mitani slowly becomes aware that there’s something extremely peculiar about the never-finished Daimatsu building and his schoolmate Mitsuru, a young man who is far more popular than Wataru and who appears to be in every way Wataru’s superior. Peculiar escalates into extremely weird as Wataru encounters what appears to be a genuine wizard and witnesses Mitsuru feeding some local bullies to a demonic figure (for good reason but it is something of an overreaction).

Before Wataru can get too involved in the fantastic, a more personal crisis manifests: Wataru’s emotionally distant father is even more distant than he appears. He has a mistress he prefers to his wife of twenty years and has decided after some thought to abandon his first wife and child to marry the mistress. Once his mind is made up, Wataru’s father is resolute and it seems there is nothing to be done about the situation except to be very sad.

Happily, for Wataru, it seems that the Weird Crap plot can help him deal with the Mundane plot; it seems there’s a secondary world called Vision, created by the aggregate creativity of humans, and once a decade a portal briefly opens connecting Vision to the real world. If Wataru uses the portal and can carry out a quest, he will be rewarded with one wish, which he could use to make his family life the way he wants it to be¹.

Mitsuru is also in Vision and has a head start on Wataru. Mitsuru is far more focused on his goal, having a personal life far more genuinely tragic than Wataru’s, and is unimpeded by empathy or ethics. Mitsuru is pretty much the ideal sociopathic hero.

In contrast Wataru is not much of an adventurer and the psychopompish figure who greets him on his arrival in Vision is visibly disappointed. As well, the people of Vision have problems of their own, ranging from a racist empire bent on crushing everything intelligent that isn’t human to a coming ritual of rebirth that will cost someone in Vision their life, and Wataru is too kind-hearted to ignore their problems, especially once he begins making friends. Unfortunately, while he could solve some of the local problems with his wish, if he wins the wish, he only gets one at most so if he uses it, he can’t fix his family life.

To make matters worse Wataru learns that of the two adventurers who came to Vision, only one will return to the real world; the loser gets a central, final role in the coming grand ceremony. Have I mentioned today that Mitsuru has a seemingly insurmountable head start and total advantage in the field of ruthless bastardry?

If I had to do this over, I’d not have put several unread long books up at the beginning. Oh, well.

I had a big book of Japanese faery tales as a kid and I remember noticing then that the Japanese are perfectly happy to reward a heroic gesture with an equally heroic death² so even though this is a children’s story it seemed to me at least conceivable that Wataru would if pressed sacrifice himself to save people who are by their own admission fictional. On the other hand, this won a Batchelder and not a Newbery so I wasn’t too worried (at the risk of spoilers, poor Matsuru’s backstory is pure Newbery; there’s a reason he acts like a teen aged Bruce Wayne and at least Bruce didn’t have a younger sibling with him in Crime Alley). It was pretty clear that things were set up to force Wataru to choose between two equally desirable goals, one entirely personal and one not. I’ll let you folks guess how that one plays out.

Actually, as the book progressed, I felt increasingly sorry for Matsuru; he has a much better reason than Wataru to want to get to the Tower of Destiny and win his wish than Wataru but he’s not the protagonist. Things come too easily to Matsuru, even tragedy, but although he knows he is in a fictional world he didn’t seem to be genre aware enough to wonder what exactly his role is. Instead, he forges ahead, sowing carnage and chaos, certain he must be the hero of the story and that his means — which include facilitating the genocidal, imperialist ambitions of a great power — are completely justified by his ends.

My problem with this book is two-fold; the first is it’s 800 pages long and the second is that Vision as written by Miyabe is a less interesting place than the real-world as written by Miyabe. Wait, there’s a third problem; I wanted there to be more pages in Tokyo and fewer in Vision. This isn’t a bad book and I don’t regret reading this but I did think it need to be shorter. I also think the bits set in Tokyo were interesting enough that I’d read a second book by this author, which is pretty convenient since my next book is the same author’s The Book of Heroes.

1: Wataru is a fairly nice kid so his wish is ​“Mom and Dad and Wataru happy together again” and not ​“Mom and Wataru happy, Dad and nasty mistress pursued by the Hounds of Tindalos to the ends of time.” The second wish would be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the one-time Wataru and his mother get to meet the mistress, who gives self-centered, mean, empathy-impaired harridans a bad name. Seriously, if at that point the book had evolved into a crime story about Wataru and his mother having to hide the mistress’ corpse, I would have been OK with that.

2: I’m thinking here in particular of the one about the dog that finds treasure for its master. When an avaricious neighbor tries to get the dog to repeat the trick for him, the loyal dog refuses. It is then beaten to death. But it was loyal! so a peach tree grows on the site where the dog is buried. I think I was five when I read that.

I think in another story the hero gets eaten by something like an ogre but there the moral was ​“never eat whole and alive an extremely angry Samurai who is armed with a very, very sharp sword.”