Flowers by Night
Lucy May Lennox
North Street Book Prize 2023 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Literary Fiction
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Lucy May Lennox's immersive historical novel Flowers by Night explores cultural mores around class and gender in early 19th-century Japan through the love story of Tomonosuke, a low-ranking samurai, and Ichi, a blind masseur.
Lennox explains in her author note: "Male homosexuality in Japan of the Edo period (1600-1868) was considered normal, but the culture of male-male relationships was obliterated when the country modernized after 1868, to comply with European ideas of morality. Military propaganda during WWII suppressed knowledge of this history even more, and contorted the image of the samurai to fit the war effort."
Flowers by Night begins in 1825, almost thirty years before U.S. Commodore Perry's fleet would force the shogunate to open to trade with America and Europe. Taking a male lover is therefore a non-issue for Tomonosuke, so long as he does his duty to produce an heir with his hot-tempered and formidable wife, Okyō. This mandate is proving hard to fulfill, however, causing Okyō to fear that she and her beloved maid, Rin, will be forced to return to her cruel father and be married off again.
Tomonosuke, an upright and austere man, has always put his personal happiness second to his family honor and government duties. It's not Ichi's gender but his lower social standing that makes Tomonosuke anxious about their unexpected romance. However, when the samurai is framed by a corrupt government minister whose crimes he tried to expose, Tomonosuke and his household go into hiding in Edo's underworld of gender-bending actors and wealthy geishas. His ableist prejudices are challenged by having to rely on his blind lover. The four travelers discover that their precarious situation has also freed them from rigid social roles that stifled their true feelings.
Lennox re-creates the physical and political environment of 19th-century Japan with vivid details that always serve the plot and character development. Okyō and Rin's romance is given equal dignity as the male love story, a nice contrast with stereotypical gay romances where wives are reduced to shrewish obstacles. As with the men, the fact that lesbian relationships exist is of less concern to Japanese society than whether the women are behaving modestly in public. Their new friends in the theater world are constantly staying one step ahead of police raids because women aren't supposed to perform on stage; instead, female roles are expected to be played by men, as in Shakespeare's day. Flowers by Night is full of such intriguing details, showing that queerness has always existed, and even thrived, within whatever arbitrary constraints were imposed in each culture.
I felt that the men's sex scenes were too abrupt, going right to penetration without much foreplay or building up of arousal. I don't know whether this style reflects how such scenes were written in Japanese stories from that era. To me, without any such background, the sex scenes had an anachronistically modern tone, lacking the subtlety and formality that made the surrounding narrative so believable. I'm not talking about the explicitness, which was perfectly fine, but the pacing.
The book was nicely designed with an elegant typeface and a cover illustration that conveyed the sweetness of the men's emotional bond. There were no notable errors in the text. A name pronunciation guide at the beginning was helpful for those of us who "hear" the text in our mind when we read it silently. (Apparently, according to my composition-teacher friend, not everyone does!)
However, I would have liked the author note, glossary, and guide to the months and hours to be at the beginning. I went through the whole book trying to figure out from context what the "hour of the rat" or the "month of Hazuki" meant, because I didn't realize there was a guide on the last page! The typeface of the author's note was unnecessarily tiny.
Notwithstanding these minor criticisms, I loved this book. It passed the test of "I forgot I was reading it for work." More than a romance—though there's nothing wrong with that—Flowers by Night beautifully re-creates a setting that differs from ours in surprising ways, yet is home to universal longings for authentic intimacy.
Read an excerpt from Flowers by Night (PDF)
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