Tomoe Gozen

[bluegargantua]

Hi,

So, one of the nice things about The Sword and the Sorcerer (a supplement for the Sorcerer RPG by Ron Edwards) is that it's got a long bibliography of Sword and Sorcery books that are recommended reading for the genre. There are a great many authors in there that I hadn't heard of before and it certainly seemed worthwhile to track down some of these books. The only problem is that many of them were written in the 70's (or earlier) and many of them are out of print. I should really review the list and ask the LJ library if they've got any of them.

But the other day I was down at That's Entertainment and in their used paperback section, I saw that they had a bundle set of the Tomoe Gozen trilogy by Jessica A. Salmonson. These books came highly recommended by Mr. Edwards, they were long out of print (around 20-years out of print...crap I'm old) and as a bundle they came to $4. Pretty much a no-brainer.

So I have now read through:

• Tomoe Gozen


• The Golden Naginata


• Thousand Shrine Warrior

First off, there's a historical (or pseudo-historical) Tomoe Gozen whose story I wasn't aware of when I picked up the books, but it matters little either way. Ms. Salmonson's retelling puts Tomoe in the mystical world of Naipon -- which is a mystical Japan one dimension over from our own. In this world lives Tomoe Gozen, a samurai and a woman. She faces off against the strange and the supernatural (both Shinto and Bhuddist) and against the purely mortal. In the process she comes to question the Way of the Warrior, but can't ever quite seem to escape it.

It's kind of a hard set of books to come to grips with. Tomoe is the hero (or at least the protagonist), but suffers and causes a great deal of misfortune and tragedy. You sympathize with her a great deal though and are all the more disappointed when her great efforts fail to win through. The tale is really more of a meditation on a number of different topics about love, honor, duty and all the other things that a samurai must balance in their life.

Ms. Salmonson has done a very good job of rooting a story in the Eastern traditions she's emulating. It's not a superficial thing, there are a number of zen moments. Clearly a lot of research went into it.

In the end, I'm still mulling these books over. I don't know if I'd immediately recommend it to people looking for traditional sword and sorcery because it really goes in a different direction with it. But I will say they're very interesting books.

later
Tom

Comments

[drwex]

Oh. Wow. You just brought back a whole bundle of childhood memories I had totally forgotten. I wonder what ever became of my copies of those books...

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I liked those books a lot (which I also discovered thru Sorc & Sword). They are heavy and weird and oddly paced in parts but strangely affecting, too. They were a big inspiration for my wuxia Charnel Gods game, even though I went all Chinese instead of Japanese for that, and I don't think I really pulled the Tomoe Gozen somberness off - but that was part of what I was going for.