When "The Name of the Rose" transformed Umberto Eco from obscure Italian academic to international best-selling author, a common complaint among readers of his dark novel was that only after wading through the first 100 pages or so of cryptic medievalism did a thumping good book emerge. Readers of "Eight Million Gods and Demons" by Hiroko Sherwin may find themselves wrestling with a similar problem, though for the reverse reason: Where with Eco the struggle is with complexity, with Sherwin it is with banality.
Sherwin's yarn, however, is not a bad one. She traces the course of a family over a couple of generations from the optimistic high ground of 1890s Meiji Japan to the bleak wasteland of the country at the end of World War II. Her main protagonists in the early part of the book all labor under afflictions -- Diet politician Taku, whose face is badly scarred by smallpox, marries the youthful Emi, who is an epileptic and very frail of body. Only at the third attempt does Emi give birth to a child who survives infancy -- Jun, who, until he becomes a young man, is beset with a painfully bad stammer.
The one main character without such woes is the strikingly beautiful Hana. When Taku first meets her, she is a geisha, and she sees to it that he is smitten by her. Hana gets Taku to buy her out of geisha servitude and, despite already being married to Emi, as a good Meiji man he has no compunction about setting Hana up in her own household. He regales her with the finery she feels is her natural due; she bears him four children.