Romulus Hillsborough

I admit, I pretty much only picked this book up because I'm a Kenshin fan, and getting a look into the historical period and the lives of some of the people who became characters on the show was interesting. The quote in the subject line is the last words of Okita, the young tubercular fellow for those of you who remember the show.

Anyway, history! Always exciting!

Not so exciting:
The author had a weird habit of calling sort of random women "harlots". Sometimes he would explicitly call out women who were prostitutes or who worked in pleasure houses, and he seems to be aware of the difference between a geisha and a prostitute. But it's difficult for me to tell what exactly he means when he uses the word "harlot": Is he differentiating between various types of camp-followers (ranging from prostitutes to fangirls to terrified young things, I'd expect) and wives and mistresses? Or something else? I literally just can't tell.

Additionally, there are a couple of chapters in which he randomly referenced Amaterasu as defining the destiny of various parties in the revolution and it's again difficult to tell what he's driving at there. I mean, if Shinto-sensei said "and as Amaterasu willed it", we'd all nod and take it as a sign of moderate religious faith. But it doesn't feel that way and there's no indication that the author really believes Amaterasu took an especial interest in these particular goings-on, so I have no idea what he's doing there.

(There's another chapter where he randomly decided to end a lot of paragraphs with "--a propensity to kill!" Again, just a little weird. And then there's the later chapter titled "A propensity to kill" in which he doesn't do that so I had to wonder what was up there.)

Overall, I'd give it four stars for being an easy read and well-researched, losing one star for the weird gender and religious things. They didn't make the book unreadable, but I wouldn't argue with someone who downrated it further for those things.… (meer)