AJ Kerrigan reviewed Tales of moonlight and rain by Akinari Ueda
Review of 'Tales of moonlight and rain' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Like some other reviewers say... skip the intro.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but it took a while before I warmed to it. It would have been a much better experience if I approached it differently.
Anthony Chambers provides layers of helpful context to this translation, by way of:
Footnotes embedded in each story
Per-story introductory sections
* A collection-wide introduction at the start of the book
Reading the book front to back and following all footnotes, you get all of that context up front. That way promises a richer understanding of each story, but feels out of order. This is like watching a full director's commentary of a movie before watching the movie itself.
There are a few different ways to tackle this collection, based on where you're coming from and what you want to get out of it. In increasing levels of detail:
Just the stories: …
Like some other reviewers say... skip the intro.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit, but it took a while before I warmed to it. It would have been a much better experience if I approached it differently.
Anthony Chambers provides layers of helpful context to this translation, by way of:
Footnotes embedded in each story
Per-story introductory sections
* A collection-wide introduction at the start of the book
Reading the book front to back and following all footnotes, you get all of that context up front. That way promises a richer understanding of each story, but feels out of order. This is like watching a full director's commentary of a movie before watching the movie itself.
There are a few different ways to tackle this collection, based on where you're coming from and what you want to get out of it. In increasing levels of detail:
Just the stories: Skip the collection introduction, skip the per-story intros, skip the footnotes. You'll miss plenty of detail, but can always backfill it later. This seems like a fine way to start if you're the type to read books more than once.
Stories and footnotes: With this approach you'll get explanations about wordplay, history/geography tidbits, and callbacks to Chinese and Japanese classics. This is a good way to get a good feel for each story, without diving too deep.
Per-story introductions: The intro blocks for each story are interesting and helpful, but often contain plot spoilers. If I had to read this book again fresh, I'd probably start here. To get context without spoilers, I'd probably read each story with its footnotes and then that story's intro section.
Collection introduction: Some other reviewers recommend skipping this section, and I agree. It's too much context too early, probably before you're invested enough to want it. Leading with this really slowed me down, and made me doubt that I would finish the book.
I suspect the intro section would work best at the end of the book, as a way to reflect on the collection as a whole.
With all that out of the way, I eventually really got into this! I look forward to tracking down some of the movies and books referenced in the notes. Some stories and a number of passages will stick with me.
