The blurb on the front of this book, a quote from a review in the the Washington Post Book World, reads: … A strange tale of adventure and foreign travel [that] illuminates grand historical themes… Hu’s story, so deceptively simple, makes powerful reading… [A] splendid book.” That’s about as apt a soundbyte as possible. What I found the book to be is a wonderful cross-cultural examination of ideas I first encountered in Foucault’s: the way that illness as a social object is constructed, that madness is construed by things like inconvenient uncontrollability, and so on — Spence makes no reference …

Kabuki is not for everyone. It’s a dark, vaguely SFnal epic about, well, sort of about the intricate connections between crime, empire, sexuality, and power in an imagined Japan which, unlike many inmagined futures, is definitely, clearly, and intelligently linked to real history. It’s dark. Dark, dark, dark. But it’s also beautifully drawn; it’s insightful, and it reminds me in a way of how, in SF, sometimes the technology that is being discussed takes on the status of a character unto itself. In Kabuki, the art is like this: it takes on the status of a character, and in some …

When I ran across this little red book in a used bookshop in Saskatoon last summer, I snapped it up for one reason and one reason alone: because I remembered the title from this post by Adrian over at mssv.net. Now, if you look at the post I just linked above, you’ll see that the book is, in fact, a kind of puzzle book. After I finished it, I had a sense — a very strong sense of it, one which Pullman works very hard to establish — that there was much more to the book than just the tale …

It is impossible to read this book without a sense of looming doom faced by all the Russians you’re reading about. The first bit of text visible on the cover of this book reads, HOW RUSSIA LOST THE PACIFIC TO THE JAPANESE, and from that line onward, you know that the people Pleshakov is writing about are going to fail. How sad it is to watch them set out on their journey in inadequate ships, following ridiculous commands, navigating a hostile political climate as threatening as the ocean itself — and sometimes moreso — and all the while, steaming Eastward …