Do you sometimes have this feeling with a book that reading it is like talking to yourself? That’s what I was feeling while spending time with 'Flaying soul'. Reading it was like jumping into an ocean and diving with exotic fish of all shades of rainbow amount coral reef. It was like hiking in well-known mountains in beautiful weather. It was like being in a Hermann Hesse's book - his world, but different, changed like in a dream.
Main character, a girl named Risui, is telling her story enveloped around a school practicing the Way of the Tiger, which is placed in the deep woods of meditation.
She is trying to figure out what The Book is all about - this is like sacred script, the main objective of the studies. The Book has no author, has 360 volumes and it is impossible to read it whole within a lifetime. Nevertheless there is no dust on the fat voluminous, they are constantly read and meticulously studied.
What Risui is also trying to figure out is the mistress of the school, Kikyo, elusive lady on whom all the students' eyes are focused. She seems to be intangible, she has all the power over girls and no power at the same time.
Besides them there are other girls, all with different backgrounds, completely distinct attitude toward school, individual conception about how it all should look like.
Risui is often making some assumptions that she later undermines and thinks that probably she has got it all wrong since then. She is sometimes led by her fears, complexes and luck of faith in herself. She is not even sure if she is a distinct person, if she can creat an independent unit, if everybody around likes her of hates her, if she should be where she is now - she seems to have problems like people tend to have in ‘real life’, even though she is put in an unfamiliar and mysterious surrounding. Risui has to break through all those barriers and discover what the Way of the Tiger means to her.
Probably it is one of this like-it-or-hate-it books, oneiric novel, with great level of abstraction, pure literature. Art for the sake of art. It seems to be a manifesto placed in this purpose-oriented world to remind people that art does not need a clean-cut purpose to exist, to be created, to be enjoyed.
To admit that I enjoyed the book would be a understatement. This book captivated me, overcame my soul, my thoughts and my perception. When I finished, all I thought about was to start it all over again, and read nothing more - only to fly in the Woods of meditation, over the drying pound, to the school of the Way of the Tiger, to listen the rhythm of the lectoress’ voice reading the Book, and to feel the sense, instead of just trying to conceive it with reason.