I finished the Second Japanese Reader. The final stories were both weird. There was a nice old man who heard a couple of mice doing sumo in the forest, and recognized one of them, a skinny one, as the mouse who lived at his house. As the old man was poor, the mouse was lean from lack of food, and was easily defeated by the fat mouse who apparently lived at a rich neighbor's house. Wanting to help his mouse, the old man asked his wife to make mochi and leave it near a mouse hole. The next day, the mochi was gone and the old man went to the forest to see the sumo.This time his mouse was always the winner. When the fat mouse expressed his frustration, the lean mouse explained that the old man had left him mochi, and invited the fat mouse to come to the house and eat mochi as well. The old man asked his wife again to make mochi, which disappeared overnight and some gold coins were left in its place, apparently the fat mouse's gratitude. The old man and his wife lived very happily for the rest of their lives on these gold coins.
In the last tale a man dropped his large rice ball at the top of a hill, and it rolled into a mouse hole. The mouse popped out and said thanks and invited him to visit the world of mice. The man agreed, and as instructed he grabbed the mouse's tail and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was in the mouse hole, which was very luxurious. He ate mochi until he thought he might burst, and took home some leftovers. He apparently told his story to the neighbors because one wicked man came to the mouse hole and threw his rice ball into the hole. When a mouse came out the wicked man immediately grabbed its tail and closed his eyes. When he opened them he was in the mouse world, and wanting to take as much as he could, he made the sound of a cat and all the mice fled. After grabbing what he wanted, he tried to leave the mouse world, but ended up wandering in darkness eternally.
Next, I picked up a fantasy book called Unsouled, the first in a seven(?) book series. The first quarter was rather difficult to get through, as many unfamiliar terms are used. Usually a fantasy book starts out in a place where life is mostly comprehensible to the reader, and moves to places that are more foreign. For example, starting in Hobbiton and moving to Lothlorien. But this book is bizarre from the beginning. I can only think of one other book that throws you in a foreign culture so deeply: Ursula LeGuin's the Tombs of Atuan.
Anyway, it's about a boy who is "Unsouled", which means that he has a spiritual deformity that makes him unable to get stronger. In a society where power and position determines everything you can achieve in life, he is the lowest of the low. The first third of the book was a bit difficult to get through because it's about how much he struggles for every scrap and suffers much humiliation. He learns a technique that allows him to disrupt the spiritual power of others by hitting them in just the right place. When a god-like man descends upon his village, kills his mother, and prepares to destroy all of his clan's warriors, the boy tries the technique, despite knowing that he will fail. The technique isn't effective with such a power gap, and the boy is immediately killed, but an angel sees what happens and gives him another chance at life and a path that will change his destiny. With this path in mind the boy, whose name is Lindon, uses trickery to enter a school. From there he seeks out the person that will be able to take him out of the valley, where he will have a chance at finally gaining power.
The concept of "advancing" in clear stages sounds so much like a video game that it was a bit off-putting at first, but I got used to it. In fact, training and advancement are more or less the key themes of the book, which makes it sound like it will be boring but so far it hasn't been at all. Until the last quarter of the book, it wasn't terribly suspenseful, but there was constantly a goal in mind or a development to understand, and that kept me reading until I finished it. The characters don't have any particularly interesting qualities, and the world, while foreign, doesn't have any kind of enchantment to it that makes the discovery an end to the reading. In fact the valley dwellers know nothing of the outside world, so readers also by the end of the first book have only seen a few short glimpses of the world outside. So this is very much a plot-driven book in my opinion.
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