The Book of Loss

by Julith Jedamus

Book Overview

Set in the perfectly realized world of imperial tenth-century Japan, "The Book of Loss" is a gripping novel of sexual jealousy at court.A renowned storyteller and lady-in-waiting to the Empress, the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 075382048X
• ISBN13: 9780753820483
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Orion Paperbacks
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

A Good Read

Though this book started out slow I ended up getting really into it. The representation of court life is very visual and the life and sorrows of the characters are really interesting. You feel for the narrator and her troubles, and wish only for her to have things set right. You share her anger for her rival, and in the end I wish she would have put her in her place. Unfortunately the book ended too abruptly for my taste, for I hate things ending with unfinished business. A good read despite that, of a land and time that does not come around too often.

A shimmering jewel

This book is a treasure, a jewel. I found it in a used bookstore, and what a find! I never saw it in a mainstream bookstore, never saw it advertised, and it's much, much better than many flimsy novels that are pushed and promoted ad nauseam by their publishers. It's poetry; it's social history. It has a compelling plot. Every scene is vividly real. It takes us spellbound (I was, anyway) into a world very different from the 21st century west in its customs and assumptions, and yet so much like the modern world in that human psychology--the tendency on the part of some toward jealousy and revenge withour regard to consequences--is the same now as it was in tenth-century Japan. What may not be the same now is a close and respectful attention to the natural world. In the emperor's household and perhaps throughout Japan, everyone lived familiarly with trees, flowers, animals and birds. The author makes excellent use of the "found poetry" of the names of animals (not just "horses," but "blue roans" and "white roans") colors and fabrics ("lavender damask and green brocade"), of trees and flowers ("violet paulownias"), and of such things as the designations of the hours (each two-hour period named for a character in the Chinese zodiac). But she does not flinch from describing grim realities such as an epidemic of smallpox. This book definitely deserves more recognition than it has received, and I hope to read more novels by Julith Jedamus.

An Unusually Good Historical Novel

I bought The Book Of Loss because I'm a sucker for novels about Japan - and I expected to be disappointed by this novel as I have been by so many others. Japanese culture is ... well, it's very different from Western culture, and it's very hard for a writer to capture that strangeness without alienating the reader. Julith Jedamus' book is very good - she brings us into the world of her unnamed heroine, a woman in the process of tearing her pampered life to shreds over a man who left her for another. Jedamus has caught the spirit of the Heian era very well - the obsession over the perfect colours to wear, the meaning of a letter written on thick white paper, the slant of writing dashed off in a hurry, the calm of the Imperial precincts as opposed with the ungoverned world outside. She never gives us too much detail - just enough to spur the imagination. I think this book is an overlooked gem. I'm guessing it didn't sell many copies, but it really should have. Everything in it is done right, and nothing in it is simple. There are double meanings, triple meanings, to many of the things in the story. Even when you come to the end, you feel like the story continues - and you're left with your own imagination to figure out the heroine's final fate.