Across the Nightingale Floor
I can no longer remember what led me to read the first book in Lian Hearn’s trilogy Tales of the Otori. I suspect I found Across the Nightingale Floor in iBooks (now just Apple Books), and it looked like a story I would enjoy. It was more than that, of course. The story was set in a country like Japan, apparently in the past, and with a strong element of what Philip Pullman calls ‘low fantasy’, where “realistic settings and characters experience and are altered by their encounters with the mythical and the other-worldly”. I can’t help it, but it’s a fictional form that I love, from S A Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy to Christelle Dabos’ Mirror Visitor Quartet. And then there’s the real classic, Monkey, or to be more precise Journey to the West, the extended, glorious and at times very funny account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, accompanied by Sun Wukong (Monkey), along with Zhu Bajie (Pig) and Sha Wujing (Friar Sand)!
Am I getting off track? Back to Across the Nightingale Floor. You won’t be surprised to learn that what I can tell you is that within a few pages, I was hooked. It was a drama built around a love story (or three?), packed with fantasy, story twists, adventure, and frequent apparently insurmountable challenges. What wasn’t there to like. I suppose that means a second confession is required: I am a sucker for romances, especially those set in other worlds where the main characters are constantly unable to get together, and even flung to places far away from one another. Should I add the Sarah Maas’ Throne of Glass books, Garth Nix Old Kingdom novels, or Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series? Oops, I’m losing the thread again, and I’d better get back to Tales of the Otori.
Across the Nightingale Floor is set in a fictional world during a time that seems part of the Sengoku or Warring Sates period, back in the 15th and 16th Centuries. We’re not in Japan, but it appears this story is taking place in a nearby land. Suitable for teenagers (and Peter Sheldrake) the two key people in this story are Tomasu, a sixteen-year-old boy and Kaede, a fifteen-year-old girl. Tomasu is a member of The Hidden whose family is slaughtered while he is away from the village and off exploring. Once he returns to his destroyed home, he is spotted and tries to escape from the leader of the murdering Tohan clan. By chance, Tomasu is rescued by lone wanderer, Lord Shigeru, who we later discover is a senior member of the Otori clan. Shigeru takes Tomasu with him to protect him from any pursuers, and later he adopts him, renaming him Takeo to hide his Hidden roots.
As soon as they reach Lord Shigeru’s home in Hagi, life gets complicated. Treated as an Otori, he is educated, trained, and eventually meets Muto Kenji, the master of the Muto clan, who reveals Takeo’s father was the most skilled assassin of the Kikuta, known as the greatest family of the Hidden Tribe. Once Kenji has revealed Takeo past to him, he starts to train him in the arts of the Tribe. Meanwhile, clan politics are imposing on Shigeru’s life, and he has been told to marry Shirakawa Kaede as part of the process of political alliances and intrigues dominating relationships among the tribes.
Takeo and Shigeru travel to Tsuwano in Tohan territory to meet Kaede (who has been held hostage since she was seven). She is under the protection of her kinswoman Lady Maruyama: guess what, this is the woman with whom Shigeru has had a secret relationship for almost ten years. If you’re getting confused at this point, the story is proving to be like one of those puzzles, where once you open one box, you find another inside, and once you open that one …
It is tempting to keep going, but I don’t want to cover too much of this first book, let alone books two and three that follow, (but, if you’re tempted, the second book is Grass For His pillow, just saying …). There are plenty of murders, fights, trickery and more, and with all that in the background Takeo begins to learn the powers he has from his Kikuta heritage. Perhaps I should add is that by the end of the book Takeo and Kaede are separated, and Takeo is taken away to learn more of the skills of his tribe: fulfilling a promise he had made to help Shigeru. An unconscious Kaede remains in the care of Muto Shizuka. Yes, if you want more, the second book in Tales of the Otori, again, is Grass For His Pillow!
What is a Nightingale Floor? They are floors that make a chirping sound when walked upon. These floors were used in the hallways of some Japanese temples and palaces, notably in Kyoto. They were built in such a way that they could amplify the natural squeaks made by dry wooden floors, built with the flooring nails placed carefully to rub against the flooring clamps, thereby causing chirping noises. While an information sign in Tokyo’s Nijō castle states that ‘The singing sound is not actually intentional, stemming rather from the movement of nails against clumps in the floor caused by wear and tear over the years’, Hearn decided to use the idea that the squeaking floors were used as a security device in his novels, since they made it certain that no one could sneak through the corridors undetected.
Despite visiting Japan on several occasions, I have only been to Kyoto twice. It’s a surprising omission, as it is generally regarded as a tourist destination and, more to the point, a centre for Japanese traditional culture. However, I first learnt about a Nightingale Floor when I read Hearn’s novel, and I hadn’t been aware of them when I was Kyoto. Now I’d like to go back there, see and hear one, and find out a little more on the topic!
It isn’t only Nightingale Floors. There is something about Japan and the stories about the country in the past that attract me. It’s the mixture of medieval traditions, exotic locations and the existence of various kinds of magic I find alluring. I suppose I should add that the characters, or at least the ones I read about in novels, are always amazingly skilled, resourceful, and able to overcome seemingly impossible adversities. When I was a child, it was the adventures of Dan Dare and his colleagues in the weekly Eagle comic. Now its Takeo, Kaede, and others. It’s not because I want to live like them: I prefer to read the adventures safely ensconced in Canberra, thrilled from a safe distance.
In part the attraction has to do with a Westerner’s simple (mis)understanding of samurai, reinforced by novelists like Jin Yong, whose Legends of the Condor Heroes (A Hero Born, A Bond Undone), who described them as truly fearsome warriors, yet men of unquestioned loyalty and principle. Today through novels like those of Jin Yong the word ‘samurai’is closely associated with a warrior class, most members of a clan and under the control of a traditional lord, trained in both fighting techniques and in military tactics and grand strategy. However, the really strong influence on people like me was Kurosawa’s 1954 film, the Seven Samurai. Set in 1586 in the Japanese Sengoku it’s the story of a village of desperate farmers who seek to hire a group of seven ronin (the term used to describe masterless samurai) in order to have them combat the bandits who kept returning to steal their crops.
Alas, I eventually discovered that much of that thrilling stuff was largely fiction. While some Samurai were solders, changes took place over the decades and by the time of the Tokugawa shogunate they had become courtiers, bureaucrats, and administrators rather than warriors. With no warfare from the early 17th century, it seems they gradually lost their military function and became aristocratic bureaucrats, and their ‘daishō’, the paired long and short swords became a symbolic emblem of power rather than a weapon used in daily life. They served as role models for the other social classes, becoming scholars, shifting their activities from military to political administration. Ah well, so it goes!
There is another tradition in Japanese fiction, and one that was as attractive as anything to do with samurai, and this is one comprising writers who focus on murder puzzles. I say ‘puzzles’ because the twist that Japanese mystery writers emphasise is playing with what best be described as intellectual puzzles. Among these, Yukito Ayatsuji’s book The Decagon House Murders is a classic example of the ‘locked room’ approach. More recently, I’ve become entranced by Keigo Higashino, and his rather obtuse policeman, Detective Galileo. In various books Galileo seems hardly engaged, just chatting to people, but in his best stories – Salvation of a Saint, Silent Parade, The Devotion of Suspect X – you hardly care because you know he is going to piece together what really happened. That is also true of his other series, centred around another policemen, Kaga.
I think it might be time to do a little investigating of our own. Let me introduce you to Gillian Rubinstein, an English-born children’s author and playwright, who moved to Australia in 1973. Now known as a prolific children’s writer, her first novel was Space Demons, which appeared in 1986, and was to herald many stories for children focussed on fantasy and growing up, as well as more challenging novels for young adults, especially Beyond the Labyrinth and Galaxy-Arena. Commenting on her interests, she once wrote: “I am interested in the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood, and so the parents have to be absent in my stories for one reason or another. In many ways teenage is an artificial age that our society has constructed. In pre-technological societies puberty marked the beginning of adulthood. I think people are resilient if they are given power over their own lives”. She’s been an award winner, and in 1999 visited Japan as the recipient of a University of Melbourne Asialink Fellowship.
It wasn’t her first time in Japan. Back in 1993, she had visited there and thought she would like to write “a fantasy set not in an Anglo-Celtic world but one based on medieval Japan”. Despite her concern that she might be viewed as arrogant in writing about a culture that was not her own, she let the idea ‘simmer’, while reading and researching about the history and culture of Japan. With the 1999 grant from Asialink she was able to begin writing Across the Nightingale Floor that October, while staying in the Akiyoshidai International Arts Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Yes, Lian Hearn is Gillian Rubenstein! Wikipedia reveals “The name ‘Lian’, comes from a childhood nickname and ‘Hearn’ apparently refers to herons which are a prominent theme in the series”.
Gillian Rubenstein has also revealed that her first book was ready to send to her agent in August 2001, and by that time she’d already written a first draft of the next two books, Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon. Let me quote from her one more time: “Since the early success of Across the Nightingale Floor I’ve been able to let go the other forms of writing I used to do. It coincided with a move from the city to a small coastal town, as well as a decision to withdraw from all other literary activities until the series was finished”. She changed, and we benefitted.
What is it about the novels of Gillian Rubenstein, writing as Lian Hearn, that attracts me? Is it “medieval traditions, exotic locations and the existence of various kinds of magic … [and] that the characters, or at least the ones I read about in novels, are always amazingly skilled, resourceful, and able to overcome seemingly impossible adversities”. Yes, but there’s more. Many stories have those elements, and yet some offer something more.
I read many books in 2023, and, unsurprisingly given my somewhat obsessive character, I kept a record of every one of them. A relatively small number, around a couple of dozen, are non-fiction books, ranging from Mary Beard on Rome, Sarah Bakewell on humanists through to Jim Robbins on birds, and Ed Yong on animal senses. The (large) number of others can easily be allocated into three groups. By far the greatest number are murder mysteries, and most of these are set in the UK. I’m not sure if that is because of a personal preference for British detectives and police investigators, or because the UK is the centre of detective fiction writing. Perhaps that’s a topic for another blog. Most of the rest are fantasy, although there are a few science-fictions in there, too.
Looking more carefully at the fantasy authors and titles, a couple of observations are inescapable. From time to time, I get locked on to a specific author, and then read everything he or she has written. On last year’s list, first place goes to Terry Brooks, and his series of adventures set in Shannara. I read sixteen of those in 2023, some bought second-hand at the Lifeline Book Fair, although most were borrowed from the library. I recovered from Shannara around July last year. Next, I moved on to Megan Whalen Turner, and the Queen’s Thief series of six books set in Attolia, to be followed by Scott Lynch’s series about Locke Lamora (only three books so far, and I’m anxiously awaiting the next ones in the series).
Well, that’s the obsessional part. The other is that I really do love books set in another world, much like our own, but at an earlier time, with magic, swords, spell and very sharp knives (but no machine guns, howitzers or hydrogen bombs). There is a tantalising aspect to some simpler, earlier time, when there was courtesy, consideration and conventions governing life and relationships. Sadly, there is another side to these settings which is the adventures usually are focussed on some kind of noble elite and everyone else is poor and exploited. Not good, Sheldrake.
Am I reaching back to a lost world, a simpler world, even if it was a hierarchical and exploited one? I like the romance of sword fights, daring adventures, (often unrequited) passion and petticoats. Above all, I love magic, the kind of magic that is everywhere, the kind of magic that isn’t dramatic so much as embedded in otherwise mundane life, magic to be understood, respected and practiced with care. Science can allow us to do so many things, but magic is way beyond the mundane, magic is strange, and magic has that underlying characteristic that it can’t really be fully controlled or understood.
To put it differently, the magic in the stories I love is the kind of magic is only just beyond what we can do. It is Takeo crossing the nightingale floor and then, mysteriously, being able to disappear, to be in a room but be invisible, or being able to project a version of himself in another part of a room. It’s the kind of magic you feel you can touch, almost, just there, just beyond your fingertips. It’s the kind of magic that the contemporary world has abolished, but back in the medieval world of the Otori it was still present. Too old to enjoy a novel aimed at teenagers or slightly older? Nonsense. Why don’t you accept Lian Hearn’s invitation, by quietly crossing the nightingale floor, start diving into the captivating adventures of the Otori, and enjoy relishing an escape into the world of ‘if only’.
