They're Wisdom Teeth Because They Make You Smart

Woes. The Young Lady needs to get her wisdom teeth removed.

This isn't a big surprise (my husband and his sister, and I and my sister, all had to have that done), but it was already looking like a busy summer. And she's never had a serious medical procedure - not even a single stitch or an ilness worse than the flu in 16 years. So she's not feeling very brave about it.

The Twelve Kingdoms, vol. 2: Sea of Wind (Fuyumi Ono)

On a holy mountain in the center of the Twelve Kingdoms, a fantastical creature - a chimera by definition, but called a lamia in the story - is born for the express purpose of nurturing the next-born kirin, one of the sacred beings who are the only ones who can make a king. She is given the name Sansi and settles down to wait for the lodestar of her life - whom she already calls by his formal name, Taiki - to finish gestation and be born. But a magical storm of great force blows across the mountain, and the embryonic kirin ends up in our world, in the womb of a normal human woman. Sansi is left bereft for 10 years.

Taiki is born a human child, into a troubled family that doesn't understand him. As we meet him, he's undergoing a punishment of being forced to stand outside without a coat, in the falling snow. It's not too surprising that when he suddenly sees something strange in the narrow space between the house and the shed - a human arm and hand, protruding from a space too small for such a limb to fit - he goes to investigate. And finds himself pulled into another world.

This story is a journey mainly of the mind and the heart - although we also learn a great deal of the mythology and ways of the Twelve Kingdoms. Taiki, raised to think of himself as human being who seemed to lack most of the attributes his family desired, is suddenly pampered and cherished - and charged with the destiny of entire kingdom. Will he ever be able to tap into the powers that a kirin rightfully born into its animal form knows how to use instinctively? And how can he possibly make a wise choice among the supplicants who seek the throne of the Kingdom of Tai? Sansi, born to essentially serve as his mother, is similarly left adrift by the arrival of her 10-year-old charge, whom she never got to nurse as a infant kirin (are they called fawns? - or kids, maybe?) and whom she cannot teach what he needs to know.

Despite the weirdness of the Twelve Kingdoms cosmology and biology - the way that both children and young animals are born still flips me out - I was touched by both Sansi's and Taiki's situations. When Taiki makes his choice - and nearly drives himself mad with doubts over it - it was all too easy to identify with his pain and bewilderment. The resolution of the situation is emotionally satisfying and involves some of my favorite characters from volume 1.

( Read more ... with spoilers! )