Archive for the Novel Category


The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

February 9th, 2025

On a deep darkness, two figures lit with gold, tumble surrounded by red and purple gases implying a nebula in space.I did not know words could do that.

As I read this book, I kept highlighting individual sentences because I was just so impressed with the way Khaw uses words. She had me at “Her casual numinosity is frankly offensive.”

But I begin in the middle, let me start from the beginning. I am recently on a quest to find books about angry women hurting things. I read and adored Red Sonja by Gail Simone and, in continuing to look for other stories about angry women beating the shit out of terrible people, I found Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World.

Content Warning: This is an exceptionally violent novel, even by my standards. “Gouging out someone’s eyes with one’s thumbs as a greeting”-level violence. It was great.

Here is the summary from Amazon: “In space, everything hungers.

Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies during her dangerous career with the Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir.

The highly evolved AI of the galaxy will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle both sapient ageships and their own traumas, in order to settle their affairs once and for all.”

That about covers that what. The who takes up the bulk of the book. What drives Maya and her former comrades takes up the rest. And holy shit is this a really good, really compelling, really queer book.

The queerness here is fascinating. There is no romance and no sex in the main relationship, only a highly toxic Stockholm Syndrome, but it is still very much a relationship and deeply queer, not just because the people caught in, up, and by it, is are women and non-binary people. This is a story rooted deeply in pain and trauma and in different ways to move past it, to let it fuel you, and to keep it around, to keep burning up with anger. There is one happy ending here and it’s very sad.

My only complaint, as such, is that I hope there is a sequel, as there is a lot left undone at the end that I would like to see done.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

If you are looking for the anger of angry queer folks in fiction to fuel yourself, I can highly recommend The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw. Once again, I link to Amazon here, but I read this on Libby, though my library system. Get your library card and get into Libby or Overdrive or whatever digital resources they have and get reading! Using your local library is the best way to advocate for it.





Three Yuri Short Story Collections

February 2nd, 2025

These three Yuri Short Story collections have been taking up space in my house for a year or more. I moved slowly through each of them and thought about how to – and which of the three – to review. Ultimately, I decided to do one combined review for reasons you will come to understand.

At a roadside bus stop, in front of the seas an adult woman dressed for the office looks to the side, a girls in school winter coat looks in the other direction.The first of our three is Yuri Short Story Collection wiz ( 百合小説コレクション wiz). This book had been on my to-read pile for more than a year. Unfortunately for me, I did not enjoy a single story in this collection and left a number of them unfinished.

Asaura’s “Warui Yatsu” was not bad, as expected from the writer of Lycoris Recoil.  By the time I  got to Yuki Shasendou’s “Senkyo ni zettai ikitakunaika no sofa de tabete nete eiga mitai” I felt very much like the protagonist and just didn’t care all that much, really.

On the one hand I was pleased to see an original Yuri collection, but in the end, nothing really grabbed me, and I struggle to remember most of the stories.

Overall – 6

 

 

A schoolgirl and an angel sit on the edge of a building reading.Next up was Zerogo: Yuri Literary Magazine, Volume 2 (零合 百合総合文芸誌 第2号). I absolutely adored Volume 1 and was really looking forward to this volume.

I was so deeply disappointed by this issue.

The first story had a great setup, then turned sharply into a incoherent plot that literally wallowed in filth. Many of the stories just left me cold, I often stopped reading because I could see where something was going that I did not want to have to read.  One story that I did read and left me thinking was about researchers and archivists on a planet on which everything lost it’s name. Again, great setup, then it just…didn’t do anything with it. Best title of the collection was” Kokkyuzoi no Pinball Lizard,” Pinball Lizard on the Border. Again, I had to stop reading that one because I was not willing to be traumatized.

I have here on Okazu mentioned many times my feelings about short story collections and how often they reach for the traumatizing or gross to create a quick impact. I am a hard pass on that. I hate when authors do that so much that I stopped reading science fiction for literal decades because the 1970s best science fiction anthologies were so full of that shit.

This volume also came with a little booklet with the cover illustration and story.

Overall – 4

 

Two girls lay over a "love unmbrella" drawing in red. One with pink hair in a black hairband and frill idol-style plaid dress whispers into the ear of a girl with curly dark hair in green blouse over white tee shirt and dark pants, holding two paper cupsLast is our clear winner of the bunch – Yuri Bungei Shousetsu Contest Selection 5 (百合文芸小説 コンテスト セレクション). I have previously reviewed Selection 1 and Selection 3 but skipped both 2 and 4 for the same reasons as above. Well, in the main this fifth volume was outstanding. I have linked the title above and image to the Pixiv results where you can read every story for free. If you want the collected volume, Booth is your simplest choice, with a buying and/or shipping service.

To begin with, the Grand Prize winner was a story so fantastic that I can not stop thinking about it. It ran in the Comic Yuri Hime February 2024 issue and was just… astoundingly good. “Tsuitou Juu-shunen Tokubetsu Kiji “-Tou Sakusha Sakakiba Mizue no Jinsei” by Maruchou. 『追悼十周年特別記事　『盗作者・榊葉瑞枝の人生』』The title translates to “Special 10th anniversary memorial article: ​​The life of plagiarist Sakakiba Mizue.” It begins with a biography of this immensely famous “plagiarist” and has one of the absolutely most fantastic endings I have ever read. I hope you will click the link and take the time to read it.

There were a number of very good stories in this collection, including a poignant one from the perspective of a man whose wife has died and how his world gets narrower and narrower, until a woman shows up claiming to be a dear friend of his wife’s. They start going all the places he promised his wife he’d take her…until all that is left is very far out of the area. When the woman steals his wife’s ashes, he gives her his blessing and only asks for reports from the places they go – a bargain she keeps up.

My second favorite story was about a woman who returns to the town she grew up in on the occasion of the destruction of her high school. She and her closest friend make up over the rift that separated them back then and they and the remaining few students and teachers paint a colorful mural expressing their feelings and experiences all along the school walls. When the mural is finished, the school is taken down. The title of this story is #89c3eb, after the pale blue color of the mural.

This collection did have two stories I stopped reading, but overall was vastly better than the other collections and previous Contest Selection volumes. The volume came with a clear sticker and postcard bonus story.

Overall – 9

In all cases your opinion might vary, and with so many stories in these collections, there’s something for everyone. But if you are even vaguely interested in Yuri literary short stories, I beg you to please read “Tsuitou Juu-shunen Tokubetsu Kiji “-Tou Sakusha Sakakiba Mizue no Jinsei”. It is deserving of a Grand Prize and gave me hope for short stories once again.





The Night Of Baba Yaga

January 26th, 2025

Bright red book cover, with white letter than read The Night of Baba Yaga, Akira Otani. On the lower portion, a blood-stained girl with yellow whites of her eyes and red irises, stares at us as if looking over a wall.by Matt Marcus, Staff Writer

CW: Rape (both attempted and implied), incest, violence, gore, misogyny, transphobia

The Night of the Baba Yaga came on my radar by way of a skeet from the Read Japanese Literature podcast as a part of Pride Month. A queer author’s English debut about an ass-kicking bodyguard and her charge, a yakuza princess? Sounds like a bloody good time! I just had one major concern: in the seedy male-dominated world of organized crime, how much will sexual menace play a role in the story for our protagonists?

Turns out the answer is a lot!

It begins right away too. Our POV character Yoriko Shindo is kidnapped off the street by a gang of goons working for a local high-level boss Genzo Naiki and is immediately forced to strip to “prove” that she’s a woman. (Genzo made sure to add a crack about trans women here for good measure.) Already the vibes are rancid, and it does not get any better from there. Put more succinctly, in the 116 pages of this book, the phrase “raped to death” was used three times.

This all kicks off because Genzo is in need of a bodyguard for his 18-year-old daughter, however he is too psychotically protective of her “virtue” to trust any of his men to do the job. Luckily for him, Shindo just happened to pick a fight with some of his men that night. After being subdued, she is pressed into service on the threat of…well, you know. Bad stuff.

Shindo is, of course, a social castoff with a strange background. She’s half-foreign, was raised by her grandparents, which included bizarre (and, to be honest, abusive) training that made her a formidable fighter. She isn’t just capable of throwing fisticuffs—she relishes the thrill of it. She’s quippy and feisty. We are supposed to think that she’s cool, but she’s a little too cool.

Our yakuza princess in question, Shoko, has had her life completely controlled by her father. Her mother ran off with one of Genzo’s subordinates some ten years prior, and while the boss continues to hunt for his absent spouse, he has groomed Shoko to be something of a direct replacement. (Do we find out that this is more literal than we’d like? Yes, yes we do.) 

Now, what could have salvaged this story is the rapport between Shindo and Shoko. This is a classic pairing: a rough-and-tumble low-class scrapper and an uptight, sheltered girl who cannot escape her circumstances. Of course they are going to clash at first, but eventually emotional walls will come down, trust will be built, and eventually love will bloom.

That isn’t what we get here. The story barely spares any words on building their relationship. Shoko hates Shindo’s guts on sight, and they share maybe two scenes together before a turning point, where Shoko saves Shindo from being gang raped by a group of Genzo’s men. After that, Shoko can no longer hold her steely façade in front of Shindo, but at no point I would say that they emotionally bonded at all.

There is one specter lurking in the background of the story: an associate of Genzo’s who is described as a complete pervert for torture, particularly of the sexual kind. The first of two twists in this book is that this man is Shoko’s fiancé. None of this makes sense considering how protective and possessive Genzo is of his daughter, but fuck it, we need a Big Bad, so why not this guy? Shindo, out of some sense of duty, decides that she can’t let Shoko be married off to this pervert, so they end up running off together, much like Genzo’s wife and henchman had done years prior. (Oh, and in the process Shindo gets to repay the favor by saving Shoko from being raped by her father too. Symmetry!)

The last section of the book is where most of the queer themes show up, as the two begin living life together under false personas. Their bond turns into something of an “honor-bound” queer platonic relationship with a little bit of Gender thrown in. To be honest, it wasn’t well seeded prior to the end of the book, and the series of vignettes we do get are pretty scant. It is the only element of the book that isn’t heavy-handed.

The second twist to the story is one that I will not spoil, but my reaction to it was less “oh, that’s neat!” and more “oh, ok.” The ending tries to wrap the story with a dramatic showdown, but it feels under-baked.

The one lone bright spot for me were the fight scenes, particularly the first one. They were all properly visceral and well-choreographed. With the title and Shindo’s love of dogs, I was expecting a certain amount of John Wick influence, but I was pleasantly surprised it comes through strongest when Shindo is breaking bones.

Sam Bett is credited with the translation, and I think overall he did a good job of it. There is one line of dialogue that I found particularly groan-worthy (hint: it includes the phrase “thunder thighs”), but I assume that the source material carries most of the blame for it.

All in all, this is very much a novella that really badly wanted to be an exploitation film. If you are looking for a grimy crime family story with a dash of queerness, then you should let this Baba Yaga haunt you for an evening or two.

Rating:

Overall – 6 For the number of severed sex organs presented to us for our trouble

As a shoutout, I read this book through The Japan Foundation via the Libby iOS app. There isn’t any yuri manga available in the catalogue at this time of writing, but there are queer-themed books and such that may be of interest. Best part is that it’s free for those in the US and Canada, so long as you have a library card.

Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.





Red Sonja: Consumed, by Gail Simone

January 12th, 2025

Here’s a fact about me that you may not know – I was a huge fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian series as a tween. Even had a Frazetta poster on my wall. My dad has first editions, which sadly did not survive to be handed down to me and I read those over and over.

It is a miracle of timing and joy that this year has two very decent human beings who I quite like as people as well as creators working on Conan properties. Jim Zub’s Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan both were on many best comics of 2024 lists. Jim is a genuinely nice guy,who gives advice freely to people in his #ComicsSchoolTutorials posts and online. He *gets* what I want from Conan and it is such a genuine pleasure to read his work.

In even more righteous news, today we are gathered together to discuss the miracle that is Gail Simone writing Red Sonja. If you follow American comics at all, you’ll probably have read a character she’s written for. Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Deadpool, Secret Six, and currently, Uncanny X-Men, which along with Zub’s Conan, are dominating comic sales figures right now.

Simone is a pro-level troll of mediocre brains on social media and an incredibly pleasant person in real life and online. Here, she channels her red haired mischief, her trolling, adds a dollop of “fuck you” and gives us Red Sonja. 

Red Sonja comes from a harsh country in Howard’s series. Hyrkania has little about it of interest except it’s horses and horsecraft. In his books, Sonja is a mercenary like Conan, from as harsh a life as he. They bang heads and other body parts in several novels, but they live parallel lives that only occasionally cross. Here Sonja has broken her lover’s heart to steal a precious item that catapults her into a cursed adventure of demons, gladiator matches, horror and death…just like Howard used to make. This Sonja is going home for the first time in years and will be forced to reckon with her past, as she deals with a new terror.

In Red Sonja: Consumed, Simone gives us the perfect Red Sonja. She is angry. Consumed with rage for losses she has endured, Sonja puts up with no one’s bullshit. Consumed with ill-timed curiosity, Sonja gets herself into and out of trouble constantly. Consumed with hunger – this Sonja has strong carnal appetites. Even reading Howard’s books I assumed Sonja was bisexual at the very least. This Sonja is bisexual and polyamorous and it is handled beautifully. Simone’s Sonja is a master of horsecraft and fighting, as one would expect and she’s fantastic at tactical thinking and kind of shitty at strategy, also as you might expect. Sonja likes meat and doesn’t want to have to decide what kind, just give her some meat to eat.

This last is an ongoing gag in the novel, one that is played just close enough that you might not notice, but it made me laugh every time.

Simone absolutely *gets* Red Sonja in a way that I have spent a lifetime hoping for. Sure, the 1985 movie with Arnold Schwarzanegger and Brigitte Nielsen tried, but it was pretty standard b-movie stuff. What I wanted from Red Sonja was exceptional b-movie stuff! This is the Red Sonja I have been waiting my whole life for.

Ratings:

Overall – 10

Grotesque monsters, hardcore action, and beer maids asking confusion questions about what kind of ale. Red Sonja: Consumed is a fantastic read and the queer as fuck Sonja we knew was in there. The link above goes to Amazon, but I read this through my local library on Libby for free. Libraries are amazing – use your local library!

 





Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, by Yáng Shuāngzǐ

December 16th, 2024

Abstract book cover: In the center is a train window, with a porcelain bowl on the sill. The shape of the window is surrounded by increasing large frames of Chinese textile pattern in red and orange, a faded photo of 1930's Taiwan and a pattern or red, orange and yellow flames on a beige cover.It is 1938. Taiwan has been annexed by Japan as part of their colonialist policies. A young, successful novelist named Aoyama Chizuko is brought to Taiwan to write about the island. She rejects the request to support the political aim, but decides to live with “islanders” to learn more about the place. She is assigned a young woman to be her interpreter and guide, a woman whose Japanese name shares a syllable with her own – Ō Chizuru.

This novel, which begins in a period-appropriate disguise of a rediscovered volume of a lost novel by the famous writer Aoyama Chizuko is so layered, so nuanced and yet so bluntly real, that it is quite possibly the very best book I have ever read.

I am fond of the “third-party, sending the second party a copy of a first-hand document” conceit that we see throughout turn-of-the-20th century British and English literature. It adds a sense of wonder as we read what is meant to be understood as the “real” narrative of an extraordinary occurrence.

In Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, by Yáng Shuāngzǐ, this sense is added to the many layers of language, social and political framing to create what the author refers to, in her final note as ” a piece of amber, one that coagulates both the ‘real’ past and the ‘made-up’ ideals.”

The layers in this novel include the sociopolitical landscape of Taiwan in 1938, but is most deeply reflected in the languages that make up this novel. Meant to be understood as a English translation of a Chinese translation of a Japanese work about Taiwan, the complexities of Taiwanese Mandarin and Hokkien, subsumed by Japanese – and what those all represent to the characters – takes up a lot of real estate in the novel proper. The “translation notes” by Yáng who presents herself as the Chinese translator of this Japanese-language novel, a novel she in reality wrote originally in Chinese, and which has been masterfully translated into English by Lin King, whose translator notes sit astride the back of Yáng’s “notes,” but are the actual translator’s notes, adds a mind-blowing other layer into the fictional “history” of this novel.

Above all this, is a deep love of food. Food is even more the vehicle by which Aoyama and Chizuru travel the island than the actual transportation they ride. Food, hotels, houses, schools, all evoke a specific place and time and mood here. Seasonal food is a sign of the passing of time as it has been for centuries before refrigeration and overseas shipping changed how we eat.

Yáng herself is a popular contemporary Bǎihé author, and this is a story about the intense emotional relationship between two women. Is it a love story? I think that question could be asked and answered in several different ways. No..and yes…and no again. There is genuine affection, and a seething cauldron of other emotions to draw from. I’m being very circumspect here so as to not spoil anything because if you cannot yourself understand the emotions here, they will, eventually be explained.The setting also allows for a secondary, more typical girls’ school “S” type story as a subplot that ties into the larger plot in potentially surprising ways. Again, layers within layers.

There are strong echoes of Yoshiya Nobuko in Aoyama Chizuru. And although Aoyama, unlike Yoshiya, rejects becoming part of Japan’s imperial propaganda machine, Yáng is careful to note in her Introduction that we need to be mindful at all times that Aoyama is a representative of a colonizing force. Indeed, it was nearly impossible for this reader to not be mindful of this – certainly every Taiwanese reader would have been. This simple fact – and the awareness of this – is the black hole at the center of the story, putting out so much unseen energy, and sucking in all things into it’s gravitational pull.

With all these layers, if you take to heart Yáng’s caution in the Introduction, the rest of the book is not a puzzle to be solved, however. It is simply a beautifully written love story to food, a sad tale of two women, and a coldly furious polemic against colonization. In the end, this is truly one of the finest works I have ever read in my entire bibliomaniac life. I sincerely hope that every reader of Okazu gives this book a try.

Ratings:

Overall 10/10

It is an outstanding bit of writing by Yáng Shuāngzǐ and an extraordinary work of translation by Lin King. Absolutely deserving of the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Work. 

Taiwan Travelogue is available now from Graywolf Press.