Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This book was our selection for this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. It was on my list already - my wife and I sit down once a year over craft cocktails and discuss the NPR book list and make notes about the ones we are interested in. My wife nominated this book for our club, and it was a vote winner. 

 

I actually listened to this book several weeks ago - we did it on our annual trip to the Utah Shakespeare Festival - but between waiting for our club discussion and the fact that I am still buried in books I finished but haven’t yet written about, I am just now getting around to it. 

 

Before I get into the book itself, I do want to note that one of our members was teasing me that I am the reason that we have now read two books with violin playing as a key element of the plot. This is false. In both cases, my wife is the one who nominated them, not me. (If you wondered, the other book was The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb, and I definitely recommend it.)

 

While the books are very different in genre and style, the one thing they have in common is that, with the exception of a plot-related requirement of suspension of disbelief, they both get the violin stuff right. 

 

In Slocumb’s case, he is a professional violinist and teacher, so he writes from experience. 

 

For Aoki, she took violin lessons for several years as an adult, and enjoyed it. Her writing shows knowledge of the mundane, everyday stuff of the aspiring player rather than the upper-level competition that Slocumb writes about. In both cases, as a semi-professional violinist myself, I greatly appreciate the loving attention to detail in the books. 

 

So what is this book about? Well, it is about a violin teacher who sold her soul to the devil, then weaseled out of the contract by promising to deliver seven souls to hell - those of her students. 

 

But it is also about intergalactic refugees, fleeing a plague and a war. And donuts. And food, so much food. And the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles. 

 

The central story, however, is about a young transgender woman, Katrina, who flees her abusive family to find a life for herself. She happens to be a self-taught violinist who loves music but hates competition. 

 

A chance meeting in a park between Katrina and the legendary violin teacher, Shizuka Satomi, leads to Satomi deciding that Katrina will be her final student - and her final soul needed to free her own. 

 

This is a fun project, of course, because Katrina is so far from the usual prodigies she takes on - she is in many ways hopeless. Not just technically, but in temperament. Katrina wants to play video game music on YouTube, not cutthroat competitions. And she has a deeper flaw when it comes to her soul: she doesn’t want anything that one could exchange for it. She really just wants love, not fame or fortune. And worse, she doesn’t think her soul has value anyway - nobody else seems to think it valuable, after all. 

 

So for Katrina, just having someone who cares enough about her to teach her is reward enough. 

 

And then there are the new owners of the local family donut store. Lan is a starship captain who has left her home planet (and her jingoistic husband) with her crew - which is really just her family: three kids, an aunt, and a sentient computer intelligence named Shirley, who was created to replace the real Shirley, who was stillborn. 

 

When Shizuka comes into the store looking for a place to pee, she and Lan have a meet-cute, and start to fall in love. 

 

There are a lot of other things going on in this book. The female violin-maker descended (maybe?) from the Amati family, but who was denied the chance to carry on the family business because of her gender. The plague, which seems to consist of an existential crisis which causes sentient beings to resort to war for meaning. Several disappointed candidates to be Shizuka’s students. 

 

And, obviously, there is the blending of genres. What exactly IS this book? 

 

Well, the best way to approach it is to accept that it is more than a little silly. It is full of humor, zaniness, unexpected ideas, and an ending that works, but is also highly improbable. It is also at least borderline YA, with all of that genre’s tendency to be a little unsubtle. It is busy, there are loose ends that never are returned to, there are some characters that seem extraneous, and some episodes that are disconnected from the rest. It’s messy, and that is okay. 

 

Read it to enjoy it, and don’t go looking for complete consistency or a tight plot.

 

Hiding in all of this fun, though, is a more serious core. Katrina experiences far too much of what many transgender people experience and have experienced. The parental abuse. The resort to sex work to survive. The constant misgendering and ugly comments. The fear of violence, particularly when needing to use the restroom. Being treated as a threat. Never knowing if any encounter in daily life will be positive or negative. 

 

Palpable in the book is the eventual relief that Katrina feels when she finally realizes that Shizuka and her housekeeper just don’t care that Katrina is transgender. To them, it is just part of who she is and not a big deal at all. 

 

Because of who my kids are, I have been around a lot of transgender kids the last several years, and I can attest that this is something real. All of us want a place where we can be ourselves, without hiding, without judgment, without threat. This need is too often denied to transgender kids and to LGBTQ kids more broadly. This is a shame. 

 

Now, about the violin stuff. I mentioned that the book gets the details right. That goes for things from rosin to technique to, well, everything. Except the one implausible idea that anyone can go from untrained to competition level in a few years. While this one could be covered by the soul contract, the improvement takes place before the contract is presented. Just suspend disbelief here, of course. I was fine with this choice. 

 

There are some specifics in the book that I did want to mention. First, Katrina has a deep love for the book of etudes written by Henry Schradieck. When I first heard this, several thoughts came into my head. 

 

First, clearly the author had to be a violinist, because nobody outside of that subculture has heard of Schradieck. 

 

Second, SERIOUSLY???? Of all the etude books to pick, she likes that one? Honestly, Schradieck, whatever its value as a teaching tool, is about as boring and tedious as etudes get. Here, take a listen. 

 

Obviously, I had to do some research and figure out what was behind this choice. It turns out that the author adores the Schradieck exercises. Which just goes to prove that every possible flavor has someone who likes it. 

 

Unlike The Violin Conspiracy, which name-checks pretty much the entire canon of violin repertoire, Light From Uncommon Stars only mentions a few. Liebeslied by Fritz Kreisler is mentioned because it is apparently in an anime that I haven’t seen or heard of. But it is a lovely work that I enjoyed learning as a teen - and Anne Akiko Meyers plays it so beautifully. 

 

The other classical work that makes its way into the plot is the Bartok Violin Sonata. Which is another one that nobody outside of the classical music world is familiar with. It is wickedly difficult even by Bartok standards. While rewarding to listen to closely, it doesn’t immediately reveal its beauty to a casual listener. I like it, but your mileage may vary. 

 

Again, the only possible explanation for its use in the book is that the author must genuinely love it. I say this as well because in the scene where Katrina performs the work, the author discusses at length how she sees the piece as reflecting the experience of being transgender, from its microtones to its crooked and limping dance tunes. I wish I had a copy of the book handy, because I recall more things in that line that I can’t quite remember enough to write with confidence, but which struck me at the time as being some pretty darn good musical analysis for a science fiction book. 

 

I also definitely have to talk about a certain very minor character in the book. I can’t find his name and don’t remember it exactly, but it is the old male violinmaker with the initials of H.B.

 

Why do I remember the initials? Because they are the same as those of the person I am pretty sure the author based the character on. 

 

I have known Hans Benning since I was a kid. He and his wife Nancy and their kids went to the same church as my family for years. He also did a series of service trips to the Navajo Reservation - we distributed food, built churches, fixed stuff, and so on. These were good memories, and ended up very much influencing how I think about American history. (Yes, I got to talk with one of the last remaining Code Talkers, which was amazing.) 

 

Anyway, Nancy is a violinist as well, and we used to play duets, and in the church worship service - that’s how I got my start on improvisation. 

 

Hans is an old German from Bavaria. His village was bombed by the allies in World War Two - and one of his friends later in life flew one of the aircraft that did the bombing. Another thing that makes you look at American history a bit differently. 

 

Hans and Nancy met at violinmaking school in Germany, and later then ended up taking over the luthier business from Nancy’s father Paul Toenniges, who made basses. Hans and Nancy made many instruments together over the years - she is every bit as skilled as he is. Now, their son Eric is the main guy, and his instruments are played by professionals in the LA Phil and other orchestras. They are truly gorgeous works of art and craft. 

 

Hans officiated at our wedding a quarter century ago, by the way. He is definitely a unique character, crusty on the outside, but not a bad guy at all. 

 

I should tell one story here: way back in the day, I was a part of the Suzuki program in the San Fernando Valley. It was run by Idell Low, who was five feet tall and had a tongue and personality well known. (For those who care, her most famous student is Leila Josefowicz - she had already moved on to bigger stages when I was Low’s student so I don’t believe we ever met, but oh boy we all knew about her. I saw her play a couple of years ago, and she is amazing.) 

 

Anyway, Idell and Hans were kind of frenemies with a history when one day, she was looking at some student-level violin Hans had in stock, and complained that it was crap. Hans took a look at her, took the violin, and went back in the shop. He then loudly ran a piece of scrap wood through the band saw, and returned to a white-faced Low who was sure he had destroyed the instrument. He deadpanned “you told me it was worthless.”

 

She passed on a number of years ago, and I wonder if she ever knew he had punked her. 

 

I strongly doubt the author will ever read this post, but if she does, and if I guessed correctly about the “H. B.” connection, I want to assure her that Hans is actually a good guy, and, although I cannot imagine him reading this book, I expect he would find the caricature to be amusing. 

 

So that’s the violin stuff. A few other things I thought were interesting:

 

The idea that humans actually don’t like things to be identical copies. Particularly in the case of food. The donuts made by a replicator don’t sell as well. 

 

The question of how to find win-win solutions to problems, including those involving immortal souls. 

 

The way Shirley is used as an analogy for parental obligation to accept and love their children - and the way it is too easy to see children as instruments, not people. 

 

All the food, and the question of authenticity surrounding it. 

 

The issue of fame, and how it all too easily destroys a person. And how the more you crave it, the less satisfying it is.

 

The exploration of what makes a family - for LGBTQ people, as well as those of us with difficult birth families, the idea of “found family” is really central to our lives. 

 

There were, as I noted, some flaws. I should mention that there are no good male characters in this book. There are some genuinely evil ones, but the main problem is that they are stiff and one-dimensional. This is a shame, because the main female characters are all well written and nuanced. I feel bad complaining about this because female characters have been given short shrift for centuries. Oh well. 

 

Overall, though, I really enjoyed the book. It is fun, zany, more than a little weird, and nerdy as hell. Don’t expect literary fiction, and don’t expect normal SciFi. Just have some fun, eat some donuts, and go listen to some Bartok.