The Samurai's Garden
Ratings4
Average rating3.8
The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama's The Samurai's Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story. A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight. Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu's generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu's soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy.
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Good points: The writing style is gorgeous. The author does a good job at juggling multiple characters and telling their stories through Stephen and his letters. I thought Sachi and her story was extremely compelling, even though the book's title points more towards Matsu as the main character.
Bad(?) points: I hesitate to call them bad points because there's nothing exactly bad about this book, just points that didn't really resonate well with me. I felt like the story never really went anywhere, for one. We meet Stephen and the cast of characters, learn their backstories, and then...nothing else, really. I felt like this book really lacked something I needed to make it a more compelling read for me.
To put it plainly, I thought this book was perfectly fine, but not really memorable. The writing was excellent, but I felt like the story never really went anywhere. A perfectly adequate, slow book, but not one that I am likely to remember for very long.
Man, weakened by tb, goes to recover with an old gardener, meets leper who gardener helped to heal.
