Description
‘The Japanese woman looked at Lily with a contempt and hatred that she had not seen for a long time on an opponent’s face. Foreigner, it seemed to say. Upstart, it seemed to say. We don’t want you here. Go back where you came from. Better if you hadn’t come. Better if you hadn’t been born. Then you wouldn’t have come here.
Lily was the first to put her fists down. Come and show me what you can do; what are we waiting for?’
Lily Ojamaa, an Estonian strongwoman, is touring Czarist Russia with a circus troupe when the revolution of 1917 throws the country into chaos. In the ensuing turmoil, she first escapes to Shanghai and then to Japan, where she eventually finds her way to the Sumō wrestling circles. At the same time, Nitta Tsuneo, amateur linguist and son of a Shintō priest, begins his journey in the opposite direction, ostensibly to find his brother’s grave, but actually to look for the Estonian scholar who seems to have cracked the esoteric writing system jealously guarded in Tsuneo’s home shrine… An epic adventure ranging across the entire Eurasian continent, The Sun Script is also a philosophical meditation on the nature of history and the role of individual people in it.
The Sun Script is an absorbing work of fiction which ranges across many countries and has a large gallery of fascinating characters, focusing in particular on the adventures of Lily, an Estonian strongwoman loosely modelled on the sumo wrestler Anette Busch (1882-1969). The novel is translated by Christopher Moseley, a highly experienced translator from Estonian and Latvian, whose translations for Norvik Press include Ilmar Taska’s Pobeda 1946 (2018) and Inga Ābele’s The Year The River Froze Twice (2020).
