This is by far the worst book I've read this year. It's one of the worst books I've ever read.

Not only does it commit the cardinal sin of being extremely boring, with splashes of gore between long passive-voice exposition that explains feudal Japanese culture in a way so removed the tone sounds like outsider-perspective sci-fi (think, The Forever War), but Kirk also borrows another shitty trope of classic white men science fiction: colonialism. Despite being a supposedly well-researched epic set in feudal Japan, the narrative feels extremely Eurocentric, especially when Kirk resorts to derogatory terms - among them, "peasant" and "hovel" for the largely unnamed working classes in a rigid, cruel hierarchy he explains but never truly examines (despite examination of the status quo being the protagonist's main focus throughout). Worse still, he casually falls back on a British slur for a Chinese person (p. 159 - "It's like they got infected with barbarity from the c*****"), homophobia as a stand-in for cowardice (p. 297 - "You fucking coward, Musashi! I always knew you were queer!"), and of course a strong tendency towards misogyny. Women appear only as mute wives (p.169), "beautiful girls" who "tend" to the needs of men (p.200), and Bennosuke's mother (the longest physical description of her being on p. 67: "Her fine kimono was twisted around her naked body like a serpent, her breasts and her sex exposed, filthy from the dirt like she was some half-wit kept drooling in rags on a leash"). Or they are featured as throwaway lines like this delightful dialogue (p.275 "... it is not scrap. It is perfectly serviceable, sir," said Bennosuke. "So is your hand when you can't find a woman, but you'd rather have one over the other, wouldn't you?") Thus women are literally compared to objects for men to use in their service.

It's navel-gazing, without answering any serious questions, or pushing the reader to consider any. It tries to be epic, with unnecessarily convoluted sentences, but often it's just crude, and when examined even briefly a lot of the descriptive prose is nonsense (e.g. p. 233 - "They crouched or squatted in tense repose, their eyes unused and staring at the floor, their ears sifting for the minutest whisper" - even though a repose is relaxed, and unused eyes can't stare; or p. 157, where the phrase "innate scheming" is used, despite scheming requiring conscious thought, and therefore not being an inherent property). The pacing is sluggish, the prose is sloppy. The only reason it seems to have such high praise is because white men love when other white men present a deeply colonized version of ancient foreign history through a distinctly Western filter and call it their own truth. It is a book that seeks to intellectually conquer, the appeal of restoring the great order of whiteness atop perceived savagery, so alluring to the descendants of colonizers who feel they have been denied glory by our modern times, leads Kirk to fail upwards. Perhaps it's simply an arrogant lack of talent and self-awareness, or maybe it's because he didn't have a copy editor - after all, he refuses to acknowledge one, taking credit for this confusing, dull cliche of a book all for himself.