Juuni Kokuki
The Twelve Kingdoms

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Written by: Fuyumi Ono
Published by: Tokyopop
English translation by Alexander O. Smith

Yoko is a high school girl with flaming red hair, going through life trying to please everyone, but inevitably failing. She is timid, deceitful, even cruel sometimes and she just wants to be liked and stay out of the spotlight. Unfortunately, living this way has the effect of making no real friends, and her red hair makes her teachers think she is a party girl who goes out at night. But suddenly, a strange man arrives with numerous monstrous creatures, turning her life upside-down and yanking her off to a strange place, and then promptly ... disappears. Yoko is left with a strange sword to fight for her survival in a world that mostly wants her dead. She is forced to deal with people without being able to hide behind social conventions, and as if that weren’t enough, a strange, blue, demonic monkey keeps appearing and playing on her fears and her despair.

The incredible richness of the fantasy world Yoko is thrown into draws in equal parts from modern realism, Japanese and Chinese mythology, and history. Yoko receives a sword with a jewel that functions also as a mirror, tying into the three treasures of Japanese mythology. Chinese mythology brings the story the Mandate of Heaven and the general cosmography.

Japanese writing in translation is typically a bit spare compared to the lavish descriptions Westerners are used to. This is largely due to the use of kanji, which convey a range of meanings, as opposed to the English language, which focuses on one right word out of many. However, Ono’s work here manages to give enough of the detail the reader wants so that the rich world of The Twelve Kingdoms comes quite alive. Few of the characters or plot points lose any of their expected vividness, and I often really did feel like I was there in the novel. The anime was routinely criticized for the confusing amount of terms that Ono made up for her world, but Tokyopop’s localization managed to balance the vocabulary well, so that when the reader is lost in the names, it is because Yoko herself is lost as well. In fact, the novel manages to remain accessible for both readers who don’t care about the Japanese language and readers who do by including kanji when a character is explaining something unfamiliar. I’m not so sure about TP’s decision to release this as a hardbound book since it might not “cross over” to regular young adult fiction like they think it might.

You don’t get the sense, fortunately, that Ono is trying to criticize modern life or government by proposing some pie-eyed return to a simpler time. This is not an allegory or even a rant against today’s society. If Ono has a point to make, it has more to do with how to live life on a personal level, that, as Shoryu says, one must first be master of one’s self before being a king…or indeed before being anything in life. Due to the blue monkey, Yoko frequently ponders moral issues and even religion’s influence on people at one point. If there is one obvious weakness in the novel, it is that the ending might seem slightly anti-climactic. Keep in mind: this is due to the fact that this is only the first book out of at least 6 that are planned by Tokyopop.

Comparisons with the anime will be unavoidable, and I certainly could not keep the images of the TV series out of my head completely, and the OST imposed itself frequently while I read. Much has been said about how the character of Asano is not expanded on in the novel, and how Sugimoto is a very minor character in the beginning, never seen again. This has the effect of increasing Yoko’s isolation and therefore increasing the dramatic impact of what she goes through. There are few other differences, however, making the question for the anime’s fans not “What happens next?” but rather, “How will Ono take us there?” Personally, I found the journey delightful.

I think that whether you are a fan of the anime or have never seen it and don’t want to, you will still enjoy this book enormously. The fact that the protagonist is a girl doesn’t, in my opinion, lessen the appeal this story would have to readers of both genders.

[Read this and other reviews at http://www.manganews.net/forums/index.php !]

Well like the review said she's a student read hair and stuff,now then If you like to see growth in character then this is the book for you.The book in my opiniong is better than the anime in the character growth because Yoko ALONE goes though a lot of hardships and she goes through a lot worse things or it feels worse than in the anime.Also I love how little minor details you don't pay attention to end up solving some mysteries.This book is the introduction to other stories,you do have to be patient though because stories or questions that weren't answered are going to ... be in the rest of the book,unfotunately only 3 out of 11 books have been published so far in the U.S. so you have to be patient.Also there is little romance and it is quite long and it had small text but I believe the story itself will make up for and remember don't be annoyed by the main character in the beginning,that is the whole point of the story her growth.

A girl abandoned in another world, without companions and without any trust in others, having to learn how to for herself, surive and find out what to do.

I have to admit, the story had me hooked. I was invested in the fate of the main character. Too bad this is not what this novel is about. Not most of it. The one interesting storyline is abandoned after the first few volumes. I kept reading, hoping that this story will continue but the closer I was getting to the latest volume, the more I realized that it all I'll be getting is some cameos here ... and there and there will be no satasifying conclusion.

Juuni Kokuki turns into a disordered mess of stories that would fit much better as a spin-off. "Disordered mess" is in general the biggest flaw of this novel. First, the novel suffers from a severely bad case of infodumping. Now, I'm not against some nice worldbuilding here and there, but when most of the volume is useless side info that serves nothing but to create an illusion that this fictional world is well throught out, that's where I draw the line. And yes, infodumping can be made in an entertaining way. Look no further for example than Legend of the Galactic heroes, which reads as a historical fiction and the occasional infodump is very much in character for the narration and doesn't take your attention away from the story progress.

Another part that makes Juuni Kokuki more of a choir to read is the mess concering names and terms. The cast of this novel is huge. But save for some of the main protagonists, they blend with each other too much. This isn't helped much by the fact that the naming system uses words that all feel so similar, making the cast forgettable by both their character and their names. Which in turn means you'll be getting lost in who's who, what's happening and why should you even care. I'll give you an example: "Sekki, Seishuu, Shoukou, Suzu, Shisui". Those are all names that apperar within a single page of text. Good luck with not losing a track. Up until reading this novel, I found character summaries at the begining of the books useless. I mean, take a look for example at Baccano that does have this summaries. Baccano cast is huge as well, and the story is jumping from one storyline to the other even more frequently than Juuni Kokuki. Yet, the characters are memorable individuals that the reader has no problem to distinguish. Oh, how I wish Juuni Kokuki had the characters summary that Baccano had, maybe it would make more sense.

And of course, this is not just a matter of names of the characters, but the in-universe terminology too. Most of it seems to be based on Chinese and I'm not sure if I should blame the translator here, but the terms stay untranslated. So not only you have to keep track of the characters, you also have to keep track of the world's terminology that only grows more and more tangled. Indeed, later volumes feel not as reading a fiction, but as if reading a boring history textbook. I'm sorry, but I don't exactly like having to take notes in case I want even a hope of having track of everything. And certainly, this end up with you forgetting some of the terms and getting confused more and more as the story goes on and the burden of having to cram terminology to be able to "enjoy" the story increases.

This gets even more ridiculous with the latest novel, in which the translation makes the choice of hyperlinking the names which redirects the reader from the ebook into the translator's notes and also keeping their name in kanji in parenthesis after the name in romanji in every single occurence in the text. While hyperlinking the terms is at this point probably the most viable method to make this even slightly understandable, it also highlights how close to reading a random wikipedia article it feels to reed Juuni Kokuki. And keep in mind, it didn't took me *that* long to get through the volumes (and when I paused, it was because I was bored too much to keep going, not because I had to wait for more to be released). Those that started reading Juuni Kokuki back when it started now had to keep their memory fresh for almost thirty years while more volumes were sporadicaly released. I have no idea how this still has any fanbase.

To expand a bit on the latest (currently) volume, it's a collection of three short stories. Yes, a coherent storyline was apparently given up on. Though, one of them has at least some interesting theme - wheter or not to allow a death sentence. Now this should, at least in theory, be an interesting short story to read. But no, the points and takes you could find in this novel only ammount to what you would find in any randomly picked internet discussion of this dilemma. Juuni Kokuki has long outlived it's lifespan. And again, I'm not against including short stories as a part of longer novels. In fact, Spice and Wolf does this very well with the Spring Log volumes. The difference might be in those stories felling like they still belong as a part of the overal story.

It is by no chance that I have mentioned multiple light novels that do something similar that Juuni Kokuki does and execute that in much better way. Because that's exactly what you should be doing instead of wasting time with this title - read some different, better novel instead.