The Blind Swordswoman: FRAGMENTS

I have read Andrew Wilson's novel FRAGMENTS twice, and with each reading my enthusiasm rises. Though it is written in disconnected fragments, often with subtle variations on repetitions, it holds together as effectively as a plotted novel. In fact, I believe it is only by writing in fragments that Andrew Wilson has evoked a whole that suggests dimensions greater than what a carefully plotted novel is able to do. As interconnections among the fragments begin to form they extend themselves out into the deepest space -- space that is both as frightening and as amazing as Pascal found it. The book may be about a writer who is in despair because everything he intends, especially the book he is trying to write, breaks down into seemingly disconnected details, but beyond his despair there occurs something that he cannot intend but that does occur, and what does occur is as vast and unifying as the grace of God. - DAVID PLANTE, novelist & regular contributor to The New Yorker.

The Blind Swordswoman

What is the strange allure of the swordswoman figure in martial arts novels and movies?

Is it all just pulp garishness? A prolonged adolescent erotic fantasy hangover?

Then why is the swordswoman figure — whether she is blind, tattooed, one-armed, or merely disgraced, outcast, suffering and abused — always so melancholy, so wounded, so tragic?

Listen to these painfully beautiful last lines intoned by a narrator at the end of CRIMSON BAT: THE BLIND SWORDSWOMAN (1969, aka BLIND OICHI STORY: RED BIRD OF FLIGHT): ”Oichi went away on the cold wintery wind, carrying with her her sword-cane and a great deal of loneliness . . . her sightless eyes filled with tears.”

Writing, like cinema, is here only to give pleasure. Sometimes a jolt of pain or sorrow can be pleasurable, once it has been fully absorbed & understood.