Laura Joh Rowland and the Sano Ichiro novels

[lilacsigil]

Has anyone read the Sano Ichiro series by Laura Joh Rowland, in particular The Concubine's Tattoo? I saw it go past as a Yuletide fandom last year, and thought it looked interesting (it's about an Edo Period detective) and got this volume second-hand. It's historically fun, though it has lots of As You Know, Bob, and I like the main characters

Comments

[elspethdixon]

There *is* a lot of As You Know Bob, which occasionally gets annoying, but I've really enjoyed them (I also have an astronomically higher threshhold for sexism -- though there's not any of that in these books -- or evil gay people than a lot of fandom, provided that being gay isn't presented as the *reason* the evil people are evil, and in this case, it's not).

Yanagisawa ends up with an on-again/off-again lover later in the series and their affection for one another is one of the few sympathetic aspects of his character you get to see (though the relationship goes sour because both of their political ambitions take precedence over each other -- the whole thing where people are drawn together because they're alike, but then are too alike to not eventually run into conflict because of it). He's never actually redeemed by love, but it comes close at a few points.

[lilacsigil]

Thank you, that's really what I needed to know. Without any further information about Yanagisawa, this introductory chapter does come off as conflating "gay" and "evil" or at least "lack of morality", so I was uncomfortable reading on if that was going to be the whole thing. So thank you for the details, and I will at least read on and judge for myself, knowing that Yanagisawa is not entirely one-dimensional!