A Single Samurai by Steve Diamond
TL;DR An innocent mountain going for a walk is murdered by a samurai. Or is it?!?
I've seen a number of people complaining that this is a first person, past tense story where the narrator dies at the end. This doesn’t bother me - narrative is an artificial construct anyway, so I'm happy to let it go.
What does bother me is that the death is absolutely nonsensical. The narrator has been riding on the back of a daikaiju that has awoken from hibernation and is now taking a country walk. Unfortunately, by doing so it's also decimating the countryside. The narrator is a samurai and wants to stop it somehow. It runs to the top of the mountain-sized creature and manages to fall into its brain cavity.
The narrator decides that if he sticks one of his swords in the daikaiju's brain and then kills himself death will magically become contagious and the mountain will drop dead (probably toppling over and killing all the people in the city they are near.) His sword has a piece of his soul in it and it will turn to dust when he dies. I really have no idea why that is supposed to infect the daikaiju.
This seems to be a pretty terrible plan because he's got absolutely no fallback. Whoops, contagious death didn't happen. How are you going to help the people now? What's that, you're dead? Dance, mountain dance! I'm just going to assume that's what happened because it's a more satisfying ending.
The other problem I had with the story is that there is no sense of place - I know I don't know much about Japan, but reading this story, I haven't been convinced that Diamond does either. I felt like this could be any generic fantasy location.
I've seen a number of people complaining that this is a first person, past tense story where the narrator dies at the end. This doesn’t bother me - narrative is an artificial construct anyway, so I'm happy to let it go.
What does bother me is that the death is absolutely nonsensical. The narrator has been riding on the back of a daikaiju that has awoken from hibernation and is now taking a country walk. Unfortunately, by doing so it's also decimating the countryside. The narrator is a samurai and wants to stop it somehow. It runs to the top of the mountain-sized creature and manages to fall into its brain cavity.
The narrator decides that if he sticks one of his swords in the daikaiju's brain and then kills himself death will magically become contagious and the mountain will drop dead (probably toppling over and killing all the people in the city they are near.) His sword has a piece of his soul in it and it will turn to dust when he dies. I really have no idea why that is supposed to infect the daikaiju.
This seems to be a pretty terrible plan because he's got absolutely no fallback. Whoops, contagious death didn't happen. How are you going to help the people now? What's that, you're dead? Dance, mountain dance! I'm just going to assume that's what happened because it's a more satisfying ending.
The other problem I had with the story is that there is no sense of place - I know I don't know much about Japan, but reading this story, I haven't been convinced that Diamond does either. I felt like this could be any generic fantasy location.