Fudoki (Paperback)

Johnson writes with lyrical grace, as if she has distilled the style and it flows effortlessly. The story is intensely poignant yet earthy and entertaining, the idea of the fudoki magnificently realized.

I really look forward to this author's future work; it's worth buying in hardcover.

This book interweaves two stories: the Princess Haruemi and Harueme, the cat who is transformed into a woman. Unfortunately, the premise of the book has to be accepted on faith, and this is a problem because almost everything that happens follows from it. When Harueme the cat finds her "fudoki" destroyed by fire, she finds she cannot join another fudoki, or clan, because each fudoki has its own myths and stories and the cat finds that those stories have come to constitute her identity. To join another fudoki would mean that she would soon lose the identity that created her. Consequently, she begins a long journey to discover a place of her own. I found the idea of an unreplaceable fudoki, at least as Johnson renders it, far from believable. A half-starved, burned cat would have found other cats with which to live. But this cat can do no such thing because of Johnson's insistence on the the arbitrary nature of the cat's attachment to the original "fudoki," stories and tales passed down from one generation of cats to another. Because this premise never seemed inevitable or even creditable, the entire journey of the cat's plight was undermined.

On top of that, the pacing of the story is slow; the two intertwined stories, one of the dying princess, the other of the cat who is transformed into a woman, mesh but do not generate much intensity. In The Fox Woman, a fox is determined to shape-shift into a human form. In Fudoki, this transformation is inflicted on the cat by a kami or god who makes the cat a human. The lack of inevitability--or motive--again makes for a less intense narrative than one would have expected. The sections concerning Harueme, the dying princess, are soulful--too much so. Her mourning, largely for herself and for the people she cared for who have already died, soon becomes oppressive.

Johnson is an impressive stylist and there are some beautiful descriptive passages in this book: the depiction of the fire that destroys the little cat's fudoki is gorgeous, but style alone is not enough to maintain strong interest in what appears to me a novel that seems, at least to me, not fully imagined. Perhaps if you have not read The Fox Woman, this book will seem more remarkable than it does to me.