Interview with the Translator, Hills of Silver Ruins: The End...Perhaps

Kate: Hills of Silver Ruins ends on an “And far away, the thudding of the drums" Sassoon note. How does this ending compare to other Twelve Kingdoms’ novels? Is it in keeping with Ono’s overall approach?

Eugene: I can imagine Ono writing a short story addendum, but this kind of ending doesn't surprise me. She resolves the major personal conflicts in the story and then sums up the traditional plot points in the excerpt from the official court history. In Shadow of the Moon, for example, we learn that "the Empress quelled the Rebellion at the Close of the Seventh Month, and deposed the Pretender, Joei." And that's that. Things aren't really wrapped up until A Thousand Leagues of Wind.

The NHK anime tries to give Shadow of the Moon a more conventional ending that instead turns into a bunch of clunky cliches without being any more satisfactory. Though I have to admit that if I wrote the screenplay, I'd set up some sort of direct confrontation between Youko and Joei.

But compared to how both The Demon Child and The Shore in Twilight leave Taiki's fate unresolved, Hills of Silver Ruins concludes on a fairly firm note. Perhaps Taiki isn't a character Ono wants to send off into the sunset with every issue settled. As Rick says at the end of Casablanca (released in 1942), "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." The war had three more years to go.

Poseidon of the East and The Wings of Dreams also have tidy endings. For her magnum opus, I think Ono was more interested in exploring why people do what they do rather than what they do. By the end of book IV, she's answered those questions. Except perhaps for Rousan, though I can easily imagine that Rousan figured out what Asen was up to from the start, and knowing how smart he was, set things up so he would buy into his own downfall (like the youma).

Plus Rousan really was curious about how the divine scales of justice would balance. Once the ball got rolling, she had no qualms taking a big step back to observe what happened next.

Two decades elapsed between The Shore in Twilight and Hills of Silver Ruins. I would totally get it if Ono got to a point where she could hit the return key a couple of times and type "THE END" and be done with it. Works for me, especially considering all those other SF&F series that either never ended or ended so badly that everybody wishes they hadn't. Like Ghost in the Shell, she can now license the IP to producers with good track records and hope for the best.

Stay tuned for the next translation project by Eugene Woodbury: Big Gold Bullion by Ranpo Edogawa, a Boy Detectives Club novel.