Seirei no Moribito

精霊の守り人

by Uehashi Nahoko
published by Shinchosha

It's a little hard to talk about this without mentioning the anime - I'd watched seven episodes before my copy of the novel finally arrived. The anime is so good that I worried it was either elevating a rather ordinary source or following it so faithfully the book would feel redundant afterwards, but even knowing what was going to happen, the novel grabbed me instantly and I absolutely flew through it. Early on I did spend a bit of time being surprised at bits left out of the anime or brilliant ideas from the anime that weren't in the book, and being amazed to discover that that insane spear fight is almost blow for blow how it's described in the book, but by the last third of the novel the anime diverges so dramatically that I completely forgot about it and lost myself in the novel.
Believe it or not, this is a children's novel, and was originally published in hardback with lots of hiragana. This is the bunko edition, and increases the amount of kanji so that adults can read it easily. The basic plot is a straight forward chase - Balsa saves the prince's life, and is asked to protect him. He has a spirit of some kind living within him, and the emperor wants him dead before rumors start spreading.
While the narrative drive of this never falters, even when they spend the entire winter living in a cave and waiting for spring, it's all built on a much larger mythological backdrop. The religious worldviews of the native people and the conquering empire clash, and history has resulted in the truth getting lost. I honestly can't remember another book where the myths the author made up were actually entertaining as myths rather than simple plot contrivance.
In other words, this books succeeds on every level, and if Scholastic puts the kind of muscle behind the English version it deserves, it should be one of the all time classics here as well.

Yami no Moribito

I still haven't decided if each book deserves its own page, but the sequel is equally magnificent, if not more so. Balsa travels back to her homeland to face her past, and is confronted with the far reaching consequences of her surrogate father's sins, as well as a complicated discrepancy between the myths everyone has heard and the truth behind them.

easternstandard