Acclaimed Fantasy Novel Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts

Is The Sword of Kaigen an overwritten standalone or the first part of an uncompleted series?

One of the most hyped (and commercially successful) self-published fantasy novels ever, M.L. Wang’s The Sword of Kaigen, was a disappointment for me. There are parts I truly enjoyed, and aspects of it are masterfully executed, but they couldn’t overcome my ambivalence toward its narrative structure, characters, thematic development, and worldbuilding.

I went into the novel with almost no preconceptions. I knew nothing about the plot or characters. I was aware only that it was highly touted on Amazon, Goodreads and by many online influencers.

By the time I finished reading it, I still wasn’t sure what the author was attempting to accomplish.

It’s a standalone novel that’s structured like the first book in an uncompleted series. It introduces and then abandons or leaves underdeveloped several characters and plot threads. The world’s political history and power dynamics are only hinted at, despite being significant drivers of the plot, leaving many central questions unanswered. Characters wrestle with multiple conflicts, including family strife, feelings of inadequacy, stifled ambitions, moral ambiguity, social class divisions, encroaching modernity, and cultural change, on top of larger geopolitical machinations that trigger the novel’s catalyzing events. However, few of those conflicts are truly resolved; and some that find closure feel unconvincing and, to a degree, unearned to me.

The author seems to have bitten off more than she could chew, aiming for a level of thematic depth, plot complexity and character development that few fantasy authors (not named Guy Gavriel Kay) are capable of achieving in a standalone work. Wang imitates Kay’s approach with a bittersweet, character-driven drama punctuated by vivid confrontations and action scenes, but her execution is frustratingly uneven.

The first third or so of the novel was a slog for me as the narrative lacks focus and relies on clunky, dialogue-driven exposition and jarring, confusing flashback scenes. Is it a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy who struggles to meet the lofty expectations of his famous father? Is it a morality tale about an isolated, traditional culture at risk of being overtaken and lost to technological progress? Is it a political thriller foreshadowed by the mysterious adventures of the boy’s mother decades earlier? Is it a tragic tale of an embittered heart poisoned by lost love?

Wang juggles all of those narratives, but they don’t fit together seamlessly, they don’t build to a cohesive understanding of the story’s setting and overarching conflicts, and they short-circuit much of the empathy she tries to foster for the main characters prior to the start of the book’s main action set pieces – a battle sequence that consumes much of the novel’s middle third.

There’s a bait-and-switch aspect as well. The boy’s mother, Misaki, is the novel’s central character, but it’s not obvious for the first half of it. The relationship between the father and son receives much of the attention early on, and that arc could have been written as the satisfying first novel in a duology (if The Sword of Kaigen had been split in two and supplemented with a little more worldbuilding to provide better context for character actions and motivations and for the story’s broader conflicts).

The second novel in the duology could have focused on the other main relationship arc – between Misaki and her husband. Such an approach would have allowed the two emotional cores of The Sword of Kaigen – the relationships between father and son, and husband and wife – to stand on their own rather than vie with one another. The central battle sequence could have been featured in both novels from the separate perspectives of their main characters; and the awkward interleaving of flashbacks to Misaki’s youth could have been handled smoothly to provide a more coherent and compelling backstory.

So much for the novel’s narrative structure. What about the characters?

Other than Misaki’s son, Mamoru, nearly all of the characters were difficult to like. Their defining qualities tended to be either superficial or unsympathetic. I could sympathize with the unfortunate circumstances and choices Misaki faced in her life, but Wang’s portrayal of her as cold, unfeeling and ruthless throughout much of the story made it difficult to empathize with her as a person and to accept some of the ways her character evolves by the end of the story. ‘Redemption arcs’ should be earned by characters, and I don’t think Wang invested enough in her characters to support theirs.

Misaki has some tremendously enjoyable moments where she steals the scene, often by confronting and dressing down persons of higher status using verbal zingers and hidden martial arts skills. In that way, she gets a measure of revenge for some of her long sacrifices. But those brief, satisfying paragraphs are offset by dour, bitter chapters that seem to serve mainly as a loosely veiled indictment of traditional Japanese culture and its male-dominated hierarchy.

I’d welcome a fantasy novel that presents a thoughtful critique of traditional Japanese social customs and political traditions, but Wang’s approach to the subject seemed heavy-handed and gratuitous at times, lacking nuance and a thorough foundation.

Similarly, the novel as a whole seemed like a thematic grab bag in which the author briefly name-dropped and flirted with several interesting social commentary ideas, but failed to develop them. Some of those ideas felt like they were being primed for exploration in later books in a series. Notably, of the many disparate cultural values in conflict in the book, just one, the Kaigenate warrior ethos, gets the lion’s share of attention, while other implicated values – e.g., of the nurturing, communal, political, religious, and technological varieties – are barely explored, despite their importance to Kaigen’s unique sociopolitical, military and magical position.

Finally, I can understand how some readers might feel a strong emotional connection to this novel. It’s the kind of book readers can easily project themselves into based on archetypal character and family dynamics – the earnest but underachieving son; the cold, stern, disapproving father; the subjugated and ignored wife seeking independence and agency in her life.

Nevertheless, this seemed like an incomplete story to me. The Sword of Kaigen has some deeply moving, exciting and satisfying scenes, particularly the battle sequences and Misaki’s various confrontations with her antagonists, but on the whole, it felt like significantly less than the sum of its parts.