![]() When Sachi is reunited with her lover, Shinzaemon, she is so overcome by desire that she is “burning” to consummate their love. Unfortunately, this melodrama is mirrored in the writing itself, which works hard to invoke equally anxious emotions in its readers. This makes for a heightened read, but does so at the expense of a more serious treatment of history. Characters are continually being overcome by irrepressible emotion or breaking down as they succumb to melodramatic impulses. ![]() However, romance dominates the story to such an extent that this historical context serves merely as a backdrop to a dressed-up Harlequin plot. The novel ostensibly tackles a time of revolution that eventually ends with the Japanese emperor founding the modern capital of Tokyo. What follows are Sachi’s attempts to discover not only her true parentage, but also a way of reconciling the impulses of her heart with the calls of duty. Set in Japan in the 1860s, the narrative follows the tumultuous life of Sachi, a fair-skinned villager who finds herself transported to the Edo imperial palace, where she becomes the concubine of the handsome shogun. ![]() ![]() The story is certainly a page-turner, but its tendency toward sentimentality reduces it to a superficial treatment of the past. In her first novel, author Lesley Downer explores her fascination with Japanese culture and history in a romanticized look at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate period. ![]()
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