“Kokun: The Girl from the West” by Nahoko Uehashi
More than technology or trade, even more than defense, all societies need food, and agriculture is thus a vital hinge of power. Such is the focus of Nahoko Uehashi’s three-volume fantasy novel Kokun: The Girl from the West, the first volume of which has recently appeared in an English translation by Cathy Hirano. At the center of the book is the Umal Empire, which controls a series of surrounding “protectorates” primarily via their dependence on a particular form of rice—ohaleh. Said to be the gift of an ancient goddess whose reincarnations still reside in the capital, ohaleh is a grain with remarkable qualities: it produces abundant crops, promotes health and fertility in those who eat it, and is resistant to nearly all pests and disease. Yet these benefits belie its more sinister qualities and the uses the empire makes of them. The rice produced is infertile, for instance, and so the protectorates who wish to grow the crop must receive their yearly seed from the empire. Ohaleh also requires specific fertilizer, again provided by the empire, and it destroys the ability of the land where it is grown to support any other grain. The cumulative result is the total subjugation of the protectorates.
Kokun introduces the world of ohaleh and the Umal Empire primarily through the experiences of its main protagonist, a fifteen-year-old girl named Aisha. Born into a deposed royal family in one of the protectorates, Aisha is gifted with a remarkable sense of smell, and she is able to detect even the faintest scents with incredible accuracy. This ability leads to her alliance with parties within the empire seeking to understand and subvert the dominance of ohaleh and protect the people from famine. It also allows Uehashi to explore the intricacies of ecology and their implications for agriculture, as Aisha’s sense of smell allows her to partake deeply of the natural world. She can, among other things, smell the pheromone communications of plants, how they interact through their roots, and how soil composition affects growth. All of these insights are grounded in very real ecological and agricultural principles.This mix of environmental and political factors makes Kokun not only a fascinating world, but one profoundly relevant to our own. The various qualities of ohaleh mirror modern industrialized agriculture, particularly the prevalence of monocrops, genetically modified plants, specialized fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, and so on. The Umal Empire in turn reflects the vast agro-business conglomerates and their political allies who enforce destructive farming practices in the pursuit of wealth. Kokun cautions against this disastrous blend of agriculture and power. Despite all of ohaleh’s benefits, its misuse by the empire has devastating consequences, the full horrors of which are only foreshadowed by the famine that begins in Kokun’s first volume.The novel is in many ways more concerned with the history, politics, and ecology of its world than it is with character development or plot. Long explanations set up later conflicts, which remain mostly nascent even by the end of the book, and Aisha frequently disappears from view in the interest of providing such context. Nevertheless, the world is so intriguing and deep that even the longest historical chronicles prove entertaining and insightful. For instance, the book offers reflections about the entanglements of history and religion with political power: the empire makes use of the myths of the goddess Kokun to give its agricultural policies legitimacy. The people believe the Kokun possess supernatural powers, but she is in truth only a mouthpiece for the policies enacted by the empire. The intriguing history of the Kokun is thus relevant to the book’s political struggles, and our own. Toward the end, moreover, the plot begins to pick up speed, and all the information we’ve been given proves relevant. Once the stage is set, the actors begin to move across a wildly intricate and fascinating landscape of political machinations, rivalries, and deceptions. Luckily, Aisha’s abilities of smell prove equally useful for political subterfuge as they did for ecology. One can only assume that later volumes of the series will continue to pick up speed as the story progresses into ever more exciting territory.Hirano has done an excellent job rendering Uehashi’s limpid prose into English. This is clear from the first few pages:
