“The nail that rises up will be hammered down.”
–Japanese proverb
In many ways, this is a hard book to talk about.
Partly, it’s hard to talk about because it’s so easy to read. I go back to the book to get a quote and I get swept up in the sheer lyrical poetry of it, and the next thing I know, the time I’ve allotted for working on this review is gone, and I’ve written nothing.
My son,
You are only a child as I write these words, far too young to understand, but the day will come when I hope you will read them. It is in my mind, as I begin this account and look sadly on the days that fade behind me, that these are truly the Latter Days of the Law. This country that men still call the Land of the Gods is split in war; there is no loyalty between servant and lord, no regard between son and father, no bond between husband and wife.
Partly, it’s hard to talk about, because for such an exquisite story, it’s a rather mundane story. It’s the story of a reluctant man who went to war and came back changed forever, and we’ve all read that story before, haven’t we? Well, yes… and, uh, no. Not written like this one is, you haven’t.
In the end I made my decision by doing nothing. I cannot say how many hours I sat in the clearing, my bare knife by my side. I was waiting, I suppose, for that moment of fierce devotion that would drive me to act. The moment never came. I began to grow hungry, and I felt the cold touch of the mountains on my skin, and I knew that my chance to be a dutiful son had passed.
Partly, it’s hard to talk about because Mr Doggett set himself a rather harsh task when he chose Watanabe Kenjiro as his protagonist. When you set out to write a novel, it’s nice if your protagonist can tell the reader some of the things you need to get across, and yet Watanabe is so wrapped up in his own misery that I honestly think he never did see the true picture of what was happening around him. One mark of a gifted author is the ability to tell the reader much more of what is going on in the story than the characters see, especially when writing in first person, and Mr Doggett not only achieves this goal, but he makes it look pretty easy.
I was not happy with our situation, but I trusted him without reservation, as if I were a child. But I was not a child. Amaya understood these things; I mistook her sadness for fear.
Ghost of Iga is the first-person record of Watanabe’s life from his mid-childhood to his adult years. Although this was a period of near-constant war, and although it is, in many ways, the story of that war, nonetheless Watanabe tells us his unique, personal view of the events of that war, or rather, of the events as he saw them. Pursued by the ghosts of his dead brother, his mother and his nurse, his warrior father, persecuted by the very armor and weapons he must now trust his life to, he sets out into the battles believing only in death, and never quite finding it. The moment never came. Or, perhaps, it came and slipped past him in the dark, as so many moments do for each of us.
This is, of course, not a perfect book, but the flaws it displays are formatting errors, not errors of writing. There are widows scattered through the book, and an occasional line was set with a hard return, resulting in a line feed less than halfway across the page, but there is nothing that can be said against the writing itself.
This is an excellent book, and I strongly encourage you to read it.
You can also read D. Hamilton Doggett’s excellent blog, Doggerel, and he is on Twitter as @doggerelblogrel.
Ghost of Iga, by D. Hamilton Doggett, published 2009, 181 pages, 5 1/2” x 8 1/2” perfect-bound $12.95
(also available as a digital download)
