Three Kingdoms

Almost done with Chapter 20. I really appreciated the footnote around p. 295 that said "at this point the main narrative starts." Not that I think the Iliad is the be-all and end-all of literature, but I think Three Kingdoms could've used a bit of that directness -- by the 6th line of the Iliad you know that it's all about the wrath of Achilles and how it brought doom upon the Greek troops.

And, speaking of cultural differences, there's an incredibly disturbing piece in chapter 18. Xuande, the putative moral center of the novel, spends the night with a hunter. The hunter, sadly, has no food, so he kills his wife and butchers her and serves her up to Xuande. Xuande doesn't recognize the flavor, but his host assures him it's wolf. Then Xuande gets up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom and run across the corpse, and realizes what he's eating. So at this point I'm waiting for some kind of reaction where he threatens the hunter, or maybe even kills him.

Instead, Xuande is incredibly moved because of the hunter's sacrifice. (Seems to me the wife made an even bigger sacrifice). He wishes he could ask the hunter to join his retinue, but he can't, so he settles on giving him 100 taels of silver. The footnote to this mentions another story, in which Lord Guan and Fang Zhei want to pledge their lives to Xuande. But he worries that they have families, who might prevent them from giving their all. So Zhang Fei, ever impulsive, says "That's okay, I'll kill my family." Lord Guan then steps in to say "no! it's a crime to kill one's family. So how about I kill your family and you kill mine?" This sounds good to Zhang Fei, so that's what they do.

And these are the good guys! There are children's songs lauding these actions. I have never felt Chinese culture to be as foreign as when I read this little bit. Oh, well, enough ranting, on with the main story.