Yukikaze is less a novel than a collection of stories, and as the overall pattern is realised, Chohei Kambayashi does something extraordinarily difficult. Like Cavendish, Kambayashi’s use of situations and imagery which may be simply bizarre to some only shows the sophistication of those tropes. The intriguing, if presumably coincidental, similarity of the polar connection to an invading alien world, which is a feature of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), may be a source of confusion rather than interest. The planet Faery is the battleground between invaders and invaders, and an elite group of misfits using state-of-the-art weaponry is established as the Faery Air Force.īy this point, despite the more "literary" spelling of "Faery" (many other references to the series use "Fairy," and in the interests of space I can only refer you to Tolkien’s essay "On Fairy-Stories" to back my assertion that there is a significant difference of tone here which the translator/publishers have been astute in picking up), anyone over the age of 14 who is without grounding in Japanese manga/anime is likely to be in fits of giggles. All that is known about the aliens (called, for reasons that escape me, the JAM) is that they use highly sophisticated technology and are set upon invading Earth. Thirty years before the action of this story, a mysterious alien force created a portal between Antarctica and a world dubbed Faery by humanity, which may or may not be the aliens’ homeworld. When it does, it is a powerful one, and one that stays with you. Dick of Japan."Īnd indeed unless you are a fan of the series, which has appeared as an anime as well as sequels to the original 1984 novel (this edition is a translation by Neil Nadelman of the revised 2002 edition, incorporating changes made to make it more consistent with the sequels), Yukikaze takes some time to create its effect. The foreword-an infodump in the form of an extract from a textbook-equally echoes the blandness of the gaming manual rather than something which would make Kambayashi, as one of the appending brief essays on Kambayashi, by Ray Fuyuki, notes, the "Philip K. On pages 293-298 of Yukikaze (fortunately, after we have read the novel) we are given the details of the eponymous Super Sylph aircraft (whose name means "Snow Wind") that is in many ways the central character of this novel. Anything that comes with a specifications sheet needs to be distrusted.
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