Brilliance of the Moon

Brilliance of the Moon is the third book in the Tales of the Otori series by Australian author Lian Hearn and rounds off the initial trilogy that the books form. It's a lot faster paced and to-the-point than it's predecessors and I found myself tearing through it rather quickly, eager to see how it all wraps up.

Takeo is now Lord Otori, gathering an army and marching across the Three Countries in the hope of uniting them, just as the prophecy in the previous book said he would. He now has Kaede at his side and plans to finally avenge the death of Shigeru and to re-take the city of Hagi from his treacherous step-uncles. But Lords who may have once been allies have now become enemies, the alliances of the Three Countries are forever shifting and the marriage of Takeo and Kaede has angered those who believe in the rigid codes of class on which their society has been founded.

There are a lot of loose ends to tie up in this book and Hearn does a pretty good job of satisfactorily concluding most of the bigger ones. Some she has deliberately left open for further novels to explore, but thankfully it doesn't feel like cheating and I don't think a more satisfying end to these epic novels of samurais and secret assassin-magic could have been written. Five battles take place in Brilliance of the Moon, and Hearn has done a very good job to ensure it doesn't get boring or monotonous.

I have to admit though that I was left a little confused by some aspects of the trilogy. Obviously the themes the author explores regarding the code of castes/classes is something too big to be completely resolved in this book, especially when so much action needed to take place and so many characters needed resolution, so I have a feeling this might be what drives her follow-up books to the trilogy (Harsh Cry of the Heron and Heaven's Net is Wide). People who read this book when it was first released as the end of a finite trilogy might've found it a little wanting though, and understandably so.

Some of the characters she introduced in this book also left me scratching my head... there's a sequence involving some kind of ogre/demon that wasn't entirely explained and seemed a little out-of-place, and it was featured so fleetingly that I couldn't help but wonder at why it was included at all. Come to think of it, this could be a criticism of the series overall - some of the characters enter and exit so quickly that I couldn't help but feel that either Hearn needed more pages to tell her story or that she should've involved less characters. I know it's unrealistic to have events like these dominated by only a few key characters and she was probably aiming at a certain historical-realism, but these are fantasy novels we're talking about here, and sometimes less is more.

Also, I couldn't help but think the ending was a little too neat. I don't want to ruin it for anyone, but let's just say there were very few surprises for me when I got to the end of the book. I don't know if I was neccessarily expecting more, but I just felt that it all went down in a far too straight-forward and predictable manner. This isn't always a bad thing, I still found it very enjoyable, I just... I dunno, as I said, maybe the other books round things out a bit more. Anyway, if you like feudal japan and samurais and cool stuff like that, and don't mind a smidgen of magic and historical-style intrigue, I'd reccomend these three books (Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon).