Of Swords and Parasols

Dragon Sword and Wind Child is a romantic fantasy based heavily(though according to the author's afterword, not always intentionally) on Japanese mythology, specifically, the earlier stories pf the gods.   The Goddess of Darkness and the God of Light have waged war for centuries, dividing all of the land intotheir two sides.  The Children of Light are led by GoL's immortal children, Teruhi and Tsukishiro, and they seem to pretty much stomp on but not be able to wipe out the Children of Darkness.  The CoL aren't immortal like the CoL, but they do reincarnate, and their Priestess, the Water Maiden, is the only one who can tame the Dragon Sword a weapon the contains what it's named after.  The only one who can weild  DS and wake the dragon is the Wind Child, who has never been seen.

Saya is a young girl raised in a village of the Light who catches the eyes of Prince Tsukishiro(being the only one in a few centuries to be brave enough to confess her schoolgirl crush probably helped) and is taken to be a hand maiden in the palace.  While Tsukishiro is kind and princely to her, Teruhi is cold and spiteful, and tells Saya that she's the reincarnation of Sayura, the Water Maiden, who killed herself by drowning years ago, and Saya realizes that it's not herself that Tsukishiro sees, but Sayura.  Saya is also joined by Torihiko, a young CoD she met shortly before becoming a handmaiden, but Torihiko is taken by Teruhi to be a sacrifice.

While looking for Torihiko, Saya finds Chihaya, the third (and unknown) child of the GoL, who has been locked in a temple by Teruhi his entire life, quieting the DS.  With the help of Chihaya-using DS-Saya and Torihiko(kinda) are able to escape and flee to the Land of Darkness, where Saya is greeting and praised as their long sought for Water Maiden, but Chihaya is treated with suspicion, tolerated only because of Saya.

You can, of course, largely see where things are going, and probably even some of the things I left out.  Like most myth-based stories, however, it's not where you're going, but getting there, even if you've travelled the path before.  (I think this is where Pan's Labyrinth went wrong for me...I felt like I was supposed to be awed by new things, not treading a familiar path, which is what I was doing.  Still, I do respect the movie.)  And if this whole thing sounds a lot like the plot of half the shojo manga outthere...well, it did originally come out in 1998.

I do have 2 quibbles, but I thinkthey're more with the translator than the book itself, though I'd have to actually be able to read Japanese to be sure.

The first is that, like the Twelve Kingdoms novel, the translator seems to sometimes make the text more "grand" than it originally was.  Though very lyrical and often using mythical terms and phrasing, the actual writing is usually fairly straightforward and not flashy, but every once in a while there would be this flashy, prosey phrase that would throw me for a loop.  That said, there was nothing to even compare to calling the legendary general of umpteen billion battles with a tumultuous reign the "Peace King of Tai" while on a quest to assign unneccessary titles to all the world's leaders that weren't in the original novel, so I can't complain too much.  (Stupid 12K translator...Gyosei would have fits over that.)

The second is that it sometimes felt like scenes were missing.  To give an example, at one point, Chihaya is accused of ignoring 2 guards, and Saya realizes she's never seen him talk to anyone but her.  This possibility isn't raised again, but later, he does talk to other people.  Now, there are plenty of things between the two points that changed things for him, so if he hadn't been able to hear anyone else, it could have changed, it's just never confirmed.  There are several instances like that that aren'tenough that you can't follow along or piece it together, but are enough to be momentarily jarring.

I think both, though, are translation problems, and neither affected my overall enjoyment of the book, which is a very nice romantic legend, and very good for fans of Twelve Kingdoms, Otogi Zoshi, or Lian Hearn's Tales of the Otori series, either individually or in combination.