Books: The Guin Saga: Book One: The Leopard Mask [2nd ed.]

I used to hate epic fantasy — or rather, I hated what epic fantasy had devolved into: cynical assembly-line knock-offs of the Tolkien estate designed to sell a series, rather than any one book. The Wheel of Time cycle turned me off after one book — although the shock and dismay of having Robert Jordan himself die before he could finish the series proper was absolutely not lost on me — and Eragon was almost too awful to be believed.

By that token, I should never have picked up The Guin Saga at all. Here we have a Japanese fantasy novel series that has been running for decades in Japan with over one hundred books in the series and with more still on the way. But I’d been hearing about Guin for over a decade through one channel or another — after all, any series that had sold something like twenty-five million copies in its native country was going to be hard to ignore. Everyone from upscale film director Nagisa Oshima to manga-ka Kentaro (Berserk) Miura described themselves as Guin fans.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.