Throughout the trilogy Herne uses two points of view. Unfortunately this lack of adjective-laden description faded away by the end of the first book and by the end of the third book in the trilogy I was skipping hunks of waffle about the way various locations looked. I much prefer to understand the setting through a character’s reaction to the place - more of a kinesthetic explanation that provides a feeling - rather than knowing exactly where the pillars are in a room. I’m not at all visual so I tend to ‘flick through’ any expository writing that contains more than two sentences of description. This is what I found so compelling about Across the Nightingale Floor – I didn’t have to wade through long, involved description about how a place looks, but got to experience it through the characters’ reactions. This established setting allows Hearn to rid the first book of almost all exposition about location. It is as if Hearn has set the series in feudal Japan while giving herself an out for making mistakes (of course I could just not know enough to spot the integral differences between medieval Japan and the world of the Otori). Hearn sets the action in a supposedly fictionalized version of feudal Japan, however the characters and culture are so firmly placed in the world of ninja and geisha that world building doesn’t actually seem necessary (or indeed to have taken place). I found much of the first of the Tales of the Otori series - Across the Nightingale Floor - completely compelling.
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