The Twelve Kingdoms Vol 1: Sea of Shadow – Written by Fuyumi Ono, Translated by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander.
Published by Tokyopop.

Since I already reviewed the anime in this post. I’ll talk mostly about the differences between the novel and the anime. I’ll try to avoid heavy spoilers, but since this is meant to be a companion post with my anime review, then you’re probably fairly spoiled already.

The core story of this novel is exactly the same as the anime, but the key difference mentioned before is that the anime had the characters Sugimoto and Asano who after reading this book I realized do a lot more than I initially gave them credit for. Some of their role is to be the ones expressing doubts or asking questions that in the novel is part of Youko’s internal monologue. Youko is alone during the majority of the story, but even when she’s around other characters her internal monologue is constant. I give the anime writer major props for all the ways they managed to make the novel more interesting as a show. Actually I’ll get to that in a bit, because I’m supposed to be talking about the novel.

I think what I like more about the novel than the anime is how much greater Youko’s struggle seems to be. More is made about the long passage of time from when she arrives in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms until the end of this novel. It’s several months that she travels, with days of fighting off demons in the woods every night with no food to eat.

There’s also attention to detail that I’ve come to expect from this author that get missed in the anime. One being that having a creature inside your body that knows all about sword fighting is all well and good, but if you’ve never used those muscles then you’re going to be sore as all heck. I like that things like this are described in the book, it adds a new layer of depth to the story. It’s again this world logic that Fuyumi Ono created that I appreciate she adheres to so strongly. I think just like how I enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica because of its hard science-fiction, I enjoy this story for being a sort of realistic take on a fantasy genre story.

Gonna be sore in the morning

Also, the internal monologue helps to understand Youko’s character and motivations better. There’s a moment in the story when Youko almost enjoys slaughtering the Youma that attack her, saying that she’s become like a beast. In the anime it wasn’t out of place, but I didn’t quite understand what drove her to feel like this. This is because in the anime, her hardship wasn’t quite as great at this point as it is in the novel. In the anime, Youko’s friend Sugimoto has betrayed her and defeated her in battle after which the rat Rakushun finds and nurses Youko back to health. In the novel, the time previous to Rakushun finding her spanned several days, at least a week or longer of roaming in the woods, killing Youma at night and sleeping during the day on no food. At this point in the novel she’s back at full strength and takes pleasure in fighting against the monsters and the world that has been hunting her and beating her down for so long.

This insight into her character definitely made the novel a worthwhile read for me, especially since at this point I’ve watched the anime twice through, and know that more isn’t coming.

Why so serious?

So aside from acting as Youko’s internal monologue proxies, Sugimoto and Asano help the story along in other ways. Actually, Asano’s impact is pretty minimal in this story arc. Sugimoto’s is more important because it creates an antagonist and also augments the presence of the character who turns out to be sending the Youma after Youko all this time. That being King Kou, and evil ruler who does not with the kingdom of Kei to become great because it will reflect badly on his own kingdom’s rule. In the anime we see him sending his minions off, and also using Sugimoto as a tool to destroy Youko. In the novel you aren’t aware of his presence until it’s almost over. The effect being that the novel stays focused just on Youko, whereas the anime by intercutting other events going on in the story at the same time makes things build more dramatically.

From the beginning of the anime you see characters that you won’t know who they are until much later, and by the time you meet them you’ve probably forgotten you saw them in the first place. This is something else I enjoyed about the anime and novel is that there are bits and details that you don’t even absorb until the second viewing.

For example, one antagonist in the story is a monkey-like character who haunts Youko with words expressing her greatest fears and doubts. It turns out that this monkey is actually the sheath of her sword that has been set loose upon her when it’s separated from the sword early in the story. When the monkey is “vanquished” he disappears and we see the sheath of the sword (which Youko had thought was long lost), but this imagery isn’t explained until much later. It’s only in retrospect did I realize they planted this image not expecting us to understand it until we see it again. Even at the monkey’s introduction in the anime he’s intercut with a shot or two of Youko’s sword.

Just looking at this makes me want to watch it again!

For the purposes of the anime, the adaptation is really very well done in keeping the same basic story, but adding more action and plot to make things exciting without detracting from the main storyline. After reading the novel I’m very impressed with just how much was added to the anime for the sake of making a more visual story that still manages to have strong character development. Though reading the novel, I never felt bored by what was going on. Only towards the end was I starting to feel a bit like the novel should go on longer than it was going to, because the last bit of story where she collaborates with the King of En seems almost rushed. I don’t know if it’s actually rushed, or only felt that way because I was expecting it to happen.

Translation – The book’s translation is good with only a few spelling mistakes that I could probably only count on one hand. There are a few little translation things that miffed me a little bit. The first was the word “sennin” which is an actual Japanese word (仙人) that has a number of meanings, could be like a hermit, or sage. A popular example is the character Jiraiya in Naruto who is referred to as either a “perverted hermit” or “perverted sage.” In this story a “sennin” is a person who serves the ruler and has been entered into an immortality contract so that they can serve them forever (rulers are also immortal). The novel chooses to translate it as “wizard” which I’ve seen is also a translation for “sennin.” My problem is that the word wizard carries with itself all sorts of imagery and expectation and that interpretation doesn’t quite fit the nature of the people they’re talking about in the book. Another thing is the word “hanjyuu” which means a half beast, half human person. Though they use the word “hanjyuu” in the novel, they favor the word “beastling.”

There are also some things that I felt should’ve been romanized differently like the word “Shirei” is “Sirei” in the novel. Since at my job I’m used to spotting Japanese names accidentally written “SI” instead of “SHI” (there’s no “SI” sound in Japanese) this distracted me, and instead I just continued reading it in my head as “Shirei.” One other bit is the fruit that in the world of the Twelve Kingdoms babies come from. These are called “ranka” which is a made up word, but instead they decided to translate the made up word into “egg fruit.” It certainly illustrates the object better, but since it’s a made up word already I didn’t see the point.