I forgot to write a summary for this gaiden. This is the first gaiden; however, most of the stories were covered in the anime, so I’ll only summarize the part that wasn’t animated.
Second part of the Gaiden. (covering the third story). Thanks to everyone for your comments. I’m glad that we’re getting some discussion in.
Hey, it’s the Return (dramatic music) of the hideous charts! Er, looking at these charts will SPOIL you for all of the novels. So if you don’t like spoilers, don’t look at them.
There has been some confusion here, so I’ll try to clear it up a bit. There are twelve Saiunkoku light novels and now, three Saiunkoku gaidens, so now fifteen books in all. “Gaiden” literally means “outside story,” and in the gaidens are side stories/short stories. Most have been serialized in The Beans magazine. The Saiunkoku manga, on the other hand, is up to two volumes right now, but I’m not summarizing it here since people are translating it anyway.
Anyway, in this gaiden, two of the stories have appeared in The Beans magazine before, and the other is new material. BTW, can someone tell me where the stuff in the anime about Shouka and his great-aunt appeared? Also, I think this is pretty much the moment where the anime and the novels are going to “diverge.” (Well, not so much diverge as the novel story is continuing, whereas the anime will, I am speculating, stop at volume twelve. As it is, the new material is too relevant to what is probably going to happen in the next volume, IMHO, for a reader of the novels to skip this gaiden).
Also, thanks to everyone for your comments! I will try to respond to the questions later.
I wish they would include a map of Saiunkoku in the novels. In the anime they did, but they change some things in the novels, so I don’t know how ‘accurate’ it is.
Anyway, I thought I would make some notes on Saiunkoku’s geography. There are SPOILERS here up till book 12.
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Org chart contains incidental spoilers, so click at your own risk.
Well, looks like I managed to finish this summary before the new Gaiden comes out on November 1st. Yay? I uh… will probably get that one done in a more timely fashion, as I plan to split it into two parts, first the new material and then the old stuff.
And now for the latest volume… BTW, this book is long; the author herself says so in the afterword. XD
More of Saiunkoku 11. Sorry about the length. I write a long letter because I have not the time to write a short one, etc.
And now, the long-awaited vol 11 post.
Spoilers for vol 10, of course.
This summary is becoming somewhat nonsensical, but I persevere.
Here we go! Volume Nine. This one actually felt rather long for the plot. Although it’s in a mystery form, sort of, the best scenes often have nothing to do with the counterfeiting. The book feels really like an ‘in between’ incident. Well, looking at volume ten, it seems more interesting. /forges on.
I can’t recall who recommended Perfume to me, but it was awhile ago. I ended up, for some reason, reading the Emperor of Scent instead (a non-fiction book about a scientist with a controversial theory of scent). But recently I came across Perfume in a library and picked it up. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind and translated from the German by John E. Woods (I figure with any book where the style is conspicuous, the translator also deserves mention), is the story of a genius perfumer and serial killer, set in 1700s pre-Revolutionary France, and the prose simultaneously flows free and displays both sumptuousness and precision. As I said before, this story is working without a net, as it is essentially a portrait of the sociopathic, inhuman protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille; normally a monster has a foil, but while there are other characters, Grenouille is the one whom we follow around, and whose consciousness is the most dissected. The story is not, really, precisely a realistic one, considering the extremes of the powers of scent Grenouille possess, but the setting is realistically conceived (having read much of this period of French history, I especially enjoyed the details), but takes on a highly… literary? quality, the sense of construction rather than a transparent style of simple description, through the sort of diction used in the text. What’s also notable are the descriptions of the alchemical processes of perfumery (which will probably be of interest to all you BPAL fans out there) and the perverse theories of human behavior implied in the tale.