Tokyopop is bringing super-popular Japanese novelist Fuyumi Ono to America. THE TWELVE KINGDOMS: SEA OF SHADOW is book one of what will be a seven-volume epic, and it definitely should stir the fantasy-loving hearts and minds of readers. The series has sold more than 15 million copies in Japan, and its success stems from its reliance on traditional and well-loved fantasy motifs peppered with a cool and exuberant visual aesthetic.

Yoko Nakajima is your typical Japanese high school girl, living with her typical family. She has the normal sorts of worries about school and friends, and there is little that blights her life, except for some extraordinary nightmares and the fact that her hair has an unusual reddish tinge. This is enough to set her apart from the others – a fantasy-fiction staple – but it causes her trouble in a conformist society that looks for excuses to punish the different.

And different she certainly is, because not 30 pages into the novel, she is abducted by a seemingly half-mad man who calls her Master, gives her a sword and asks her to kill a giant predatory bird. Yoko does so, hating the violence all the while, and then she is whisked off in a frantic dash to escape hordes of demonic monsters. She escapes by plunging into the shadow of the moon’s reflection on the sea and wakes up, alone, in a foreign land with no friends, no knowledge of where she is, and no way to get back home.

And it’s here that the story really starts, filled with innumerable wild twists that I don’t want to ruin for you.

Ono is excellent at depicting the inner conflicts of Yoko. You feel her homesickness, fear and despair, and you can also sense the substrate of steel that forms her moral character. While the protagonist is well-drawn, other characters are mere ciphers, and it may take more books to explore their depths. The translation and “English adaptation” (?) by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander is adequate and readable, but there’s no poetry to it.

Even stunning visual scenes as the shattering of the glass windows during Yoko’s abduction or the attachment of the demon swordsman Joyu to Yoko’s body are related in flat, monochromatic tones. And the accompanying illustrations – under the art direction of Anne Marie Horne – seem too busy and too coagulated in ink to add anything to the tale.

This isn’t the greatest fantasy ever written, but Yoko’s likable character and the sense we have of her own confusion at being stranded in a demon-filled world all combine to make SEA OF SHADOW a truly enjoyable book, and an auspicious start to THE TWELVE KINGDOMS series. For American readers, the Japanese angle to this epic also will be a refreshing change. Very worthwhile. –Mark Rose

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