skygiants

For years now the knowledge that there was one Twelve Kingdoms book I could never read because there was no English translation has been a constant sad awareness in my mental peripheral vision. (In some cases also my physical peripheral vision, due to izilen dangling the French translation over my shoulder and attempting to make me translate it into English on the spot.)

But now, AT LONG LAST, Eugene Woodbury has done an English-language fan translation of The Wings of Dreams (downloadable here. And, yet again, Fuyumi Ono proves that she's writing specifically for me: angry little girls with overblown ideas of their own importance who take no guff from irresponsible adults are one of my FAVORITE CHARACTER ARCHETYPES. (See: Mary Lennox, Helen Haras-uquara and Hildy Navissdaughter, among others.)

So as you may know, Bob, in Twelve Kingdoms land, kings are divinely chosen by magic unicorns. Kingly candidates can go on an often-fatal desert pilgrimage on the chance of being selected by their country's own particular magic unicorn; meanwhile, everything in a kingdom just gets consistently divinely worse (famine, fatal monster attacks, etc. etc.) until a king is chosen. The Wings of Dreams kicks off with Shushou, a privileged and precocious little girl from a rich family, deciding it is just FLAT-OUT RIDICULOUS that her country does not have a king yet. LIKE, SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE, GOING ON MONSTER-INFESTED DESERT PILGRIMAGE IS NOT THAT HARD, OKAY. IT'S NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SCIENCE. Obviously, the path before her has been prepared: she steals her family's expensive riding beast and runs away from home to make the magic unicorn pilgrimage herself, because damn if Shushou is not going to put her twelve-year-old money where her mouth is.

Eventually she picks up a cheerfully mysterious hanger-on and hires a long-suffering bodyguard who thinks she's an idiot. The rest of the book consists of the pilgrimage, which is basically an extended examination of how much help you should give to others at cost to yourself and what moral sacrifices are acceptable for the greater good, as depicted through various scenes of monsters eating people and Shushou and her bodyguard shouting at each other. Shushou spends a lot of time throwing the temper tantrums of a twelve-year-old moral absolutist who has just been confronted with shades of gray, making subsequently poor decisions, and then taking responsibility for the consequences. I LOVE IT ALL. Please continue with your probing examinations of standard fantasy tropes, Fuyumi Ono! Never change!

(For the record: though the book is part of the greater Twelve Kingdoms series, it's temporally disconnected from the other books and no knowledge of them is necessary.)