Flowers by Night by Lucy May Lennox
Highly recommended if you’re looking for something different to break you out of a reading slump!
This novel is set in 1825, during Japan’s Edo period. Uchida Tomonosuke, a low-ranking samurai, is drinking at a teahouse when he overhears Ichi being violently refused service.
Ichi is looked down on as a member of the Tōdōza, a guild for blind men who were trained in music, storytelling, massage therapy etc. Members of the Tōdōza were also moneylenders during a time when samurai tended to suffer economic hardship.
Tomonosuke comes to Ichi's rescue and engages his services as a masseur. Their feelings for each other grow despite their steep difference in class. They also have to navigate Tomonosuke’s disapproving wife, bureaucratic shenanigans and natural disasters.
I really loved the historical setting, which is impressively immersive.
The characters are properly fleshed out. Ichi is calm, earnest and a thoughtful optimist. He understands himself, and society, quite well. He has misgivings about Tomonosuke’s ignorant attitude towards the Tōdōza and Ichi's blindness. Tomonosuke is honourable but not particularly quick witted, and the novel puts him through his paces!
The question underlying the romance is whether Ichi can trust Tomonosuke to see past the comforting strictures of the society he is accustomed to and create a sustainable life with Ichi, even if it has to be on the margins of society.
It’s an interestingly written question, and well answered.
Some other aspects of the novel that stood out to me are:
- Tomonosuke’s abrasive wife Okyo and her loyal servant Rin, who are well-written and prominent characters in their own right;
- the detail with which Ichi’s musicianship is depicted;
- the theme of found family, which emerges after much interpersonal strife between the characters, particularly Tomonosuke and his wife;
- the depiction of gender fluidity and sexuality;
- Ichi and Tomonosuke bonding over real historical literature and the use of that literature to portray the emotional landscape of the time, particularly as it pertained to relationships between men;
- how the typically staid Tomonosuke gets better at describing the environment to Ichi - it helps that he has a lot of poetry memorised to draw on!