REVIEW: The Sword of Kaigen
I got pulled towards the Sword of Kaigen through my typical research of looking for books with fire fight scenes, and I heard this one had amazing swordfights, elemental abilities, and, as the name might imply — samurai. I love samurai themes, as a huge fan of things like Samurai Champloo or Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei, so after hearing about this, I went in almost blind without knowing what to expect.
For the premise, the Sword of Kaigen is a standalone military fantasy novel about fighters on a peninsula dubbed the “Sword of Kaigen” (credits roll), and we focus on Mamoru, a 14-year-old boy failing to master his family’s iconic techniques, and Misaki, his mother who buried her fighting past, as they face a looming threat of invasion.
THE GOVERNMENT IS A LIE
At least, a looming threat hidden from their own eyes. I didn’t expect such a focus on a lying government, and that aspect had me hooked from the beginning. It starts off with Mamoru befriending a new kid who reveals his history lesson to be a lie, and then we get hints like the news talking about coastal towns hit by storms. This book came out in 2018, yet, fortunately or unfortunately, I kept seeing how much it paralleled the news cycle nowadays.
Continuing on that point, the conflict of learning that your entire government, your way of life, your entire familial legacy might be built on a lie made Mamoru such a great character to follow. Mamoru’s storming with confusion and rebellion, questioning his parents and the techniques he’s supposed to learn, and the heavy conflict even carries over to Misaki, who knows since she had to give up so much of her old life to fit into a role that she didn’t even fully want.
Speaking of her old life, though, that’s another insane point — Misaki used to be a superhero.
CAPES AND MASKS?
No, not that superhero. Not that directly, at least. But her and a few friends, as college students, used to wear masks to hide their identities and used alternate personas to wield their elemental abilities against criminals. Think less Justice League, but more like the Defenders if Matt/Daredevil could wield ice blades.
That got me even more attached to the premise, now that it combined samurai and superheroes? It added to the coolness factor even more, and I got so attached to her being stuck in a marriage she was unhappy with, stuck with a controlling, unfeeling man, and they focus so much on the clashes of legacy and tradition with our own happiness.
But all of this, the government lying, how Mamoru feels about his legacy and the technique he can’t inherit, the details of Misaki’s past, all of it comes to a head when the Ranganese attack.
AND THEN THE FIRE NATION ATTACKED
This makes me understand why the Fire Nation genocided the Air Nation, cause here?
Airbenders are horrifying.
The Sword of Kaigen has some amazing fight scenes, and I truly understood how masterfully it took advantage of the elemental abilities when our Kaiganese samurai started dying because the invading military hit them with invisible attacks. So, what do they do?
Throw up a screen of water vapor, so they can actually see the attacks through the smoke.
It comes off like that scene in the Legend of Korra where Zaheer stole the air from the earth queen’s lungs. A certain really powerful and charismatic character stays behind to make his last stand, but you wanna know how he dies, as a waterbender?
He sends all of his blood out, freezing branches and branches of needle-like spears and killing hundreds of soldiers.
His wasn’t the worst death, though. I didn’t think they would straight up kill a main character, and when I saw this quote?
A decade later, a fifteen-year-old Hiroshi would become known as the youngest swordsman ever to master the Whispering Blade. What the world would never know, was that he was the second youngest.
Heartbreaking.
But it gets so much worse afterwards. The Sword of Kaigen spends a lot of time with the aftermath of the invation, and Misaki’s reaction to Mamoru’s death, the final lamentations of a mother at her suns grave, genuinely broke me. Her passion and emotion brought me to genuine tears, one of the saddest moments I’ve read in any book recently.
This… you are my story… and I was so selfish, so tied to that shadow that I missed it. And my son, I— I’m so sorry it took me this long to understand. I’m sorry—” the words caught in her throat, choking her, until pain shot through her chest, forcing her to let them out. “I never loved you the way I should have.
There’s still a high point coming afterwards, though, as she finally faces her husband. Through the entire book, her husband, Takeru, has been the closest thing to an antagonist that we have. He berates and demeans Misaki with an inhuman coldness towards her emotions, physically reprimands Mamoru, and even if he does lock in once the Ranganese attack, I spend the entire book hating him.
Until Misaki fights him.
BECOME THE MOUNTAIN
The magic system in this book is on another level, because everything I just described about Takeru’s character comes from him using magic as a coping mechanism. His waterbending is so locked in that when he touches snow, he becomes the mountain, sensing everything on the island down to blades of grass. So when he was younger and his father would beat him to a pulp while training, Takeru hid his emotions and became the mountain. When he felt like he wasn’t doing his job as a father, he buried his emotions and became the mountain.
When the military came and told him he couldn’t bury his own son, he ran from his emotions and became the mountain.
Everything led to this point, and his character development afterwards was amazing. Even if the book ends with some vicious sequel bait that goes nowhere, it didn’t diminish how much I enjoyed everything leading up to that point. I hate that it didn’t directly get a sequel, but at a certain point, I forgot this book was even self-published, and I can only hope that my own books makes it to that same level.
So, as a final rating…