Souls are cheap.
The trick is finding the right soul.
Katrina Nguyen, a transgender teenager from a very unaccepting family, decides that her latest beating is one beating too many. She climbs out of her family’s apartment and boards a bus to Los Angeles, bringing along not much more than her laptop and her treasured violin.
Meanwhile Shizuka Satomi is also on the way to LA. Dubbed “The Queen of Hell” by the music community, Shizuka has trained six violin protegees and convinced each of them to sell their souls to hell. She has a year to find one more soul before her own bargain is complete, and she has the idea her seventh student is going to be somewhere around her old neighborhood of Monterey Park.
Ryka Aoki’s Hugo-nominated novel sounds like it’s going to be a traditional story of a Faustian bargain with a desperate artist, but it expands into music and belonging, to women fighting to be accepted, and a love-affair with an interstellar refugee inside a giant concrete donut.
I’m glad I came to this novel relatively unspoiled so I could be a little shocked by it. We start with Katrina beginning her life as a runaway, then move to the fabulously wealthy Shizuka and her cold calculations about how she needs to find a violinist (and a soul) worthy enough of being her final student. All of a sudden we’re in the whimsically-shaped family-run business Starrgate Donut and I thought, oh neat, they’re all using Star Trek terminology for fun, calling the mother (Lan Tran) “Captain” and making references to replicators and…no wait, this is an actual spaceship crew from an alien race making donuts in LA what the heck is happening?
The tonal shifts in this book are that abrupt. There’s no time to get bored because the reader is constantly kept on their toes with the fundamentals of advanced violin (and repairing the same), an intergalactic war (and related technology), pacts with hell, and a small slice of the hell that it is to be transgender in a world that loves to have a visibly identifiable target.
Katrina’s early chapters are harrowing. She’s experienced the kind of abuse that would drive a teenager to live in the streets, along with the hazards that come from being young and homeless: no way of knowing where your next meal is coming from, dependent on the “nice” person who offers a couch. Robbery. Rape. It’s all told with as few gory details as possible, mostly in memories or just before/just after it’s happened. Katrina has had to survive on sex work (on the internet when possible, in person when not), so while her experiences are miserable, they’re not paralyzing, just one more reason that the world sucks and people are awful.
A self-taught runaway teenager with a cheap violin bought from eBay is the very last person anyone thought the famous Shizuka Satomi would choose to be her next student, but a chance encounter at a duck pond convinces Shizuka that Katrina is more exceptional than any of the privileged wealthy violinists she’s seen and rejected in the last ten years.
I’ve been playing violin off and on since I was ten, but the kinds of training and skill being demonstrated here are on a completely different level from anything I’ve experienced. And yet Aoki makes it all relatable. There are little moments that even a casual violinist would recognize, like why the suggestion to “put tape on the fingerboard” would be a cutting insult. And then there are lyrical sections that made me wish I truly loved music the way Katrina does.
The book offers fascinating tidbits about training to become a master violinist but also about violins themselves, who made the famous ones, how they’re made and – when the character of Lucy Matia is introduced – the ways that even the cheap mass-produced ones can be made better. At least, they can be once they find someone who has enough sense to not sneer at a repair request from Shizuka Satomi.
“Though it is not from a prestigious maker, its sound may surprise you. And my student bought this with every penny she had.” Shizuka said the last line innocently, but Lucy could feel the gaze of the Queen of Hell. If you dare laugh at her or her violin, I will burn your soul and this entire shop to ash.
(Shizuka’s powers as the Queen of Hell aren’t always well defined, but we do get some satisfying moments as she delivers a mystical beatdown to someone who desperately deserves it. I liked Shizuka more with every display of protectiveness towards Katrina and her violin.
The rags-to-riches story might have progressed along to the usual conclusion of one more soul sent on its way to hell, but then Shizuka has to take an emergency bathroom break and meets Lan Tran and her family of refugees from the (also not terribly well defined) Endplague. Shizuka and Lan are pretty much smitten from the start, and everything about Shizuka’s plans for Katrina starts getting complicated.
The alien tech that Lan brings to the story with her donut-shaped stargate can feel a little hand-wavy. We keep finding out things they can magically just do right when the plot requires it: holograms and instant healing and high-teching the baking process with lasers and bringing in phrases like “Have you aligned the donut with the local continuum?”
And yet sometimes all of this feels exactly right, like it’s a desperate daydream by someone who is so longing for acceptance that everything feels like it would need a magic spell and a Star Trek holodeck. “I want my parents to love me for who I am, for my dad to stop drinking and stop hitting me, for people to see me as a person and a musician instead of a freak, and as long as I’m dreaming I’d also like a pony.”
Aoki brings into focus so many ways that someone who’s transgender has to fight every moment of their lives to just be allowed to live. She makes the fear of performing echo the fear of simply being existing. There are little poison pills, like how having a strong hand with a good reach would be a blessing for a violinist but also a curse because they’re such a visual signal of “wasn’t born as a girl”. There are people who support trans rights, and there are moments of breathtaking cruelty, but there’s also the misery of knowing that in the battle between pro and anti, the actual person and everything else they’re trying to do is completely forgotten.
Being doubted hurts. But what hurts even worse is not being heard.
The book is very much centered around women trying to be seen and heard: Katrina with her music and her gender, Lucy Matia fighting to claim a place in a legacy that was only ever passed from father to son, Shizuka who made her own pact with hell decades ago for very understandable reasons, Lan wearing herself to the bone trying to make her family safe. But there also many fun moments of transformation and discovery: Shizuka rediscovering the microcosm of Asian culture and food in Monterey Park, the giddy joy of Lan experiencing the transcendent wonder of Olive Garden and endless breadsticks, the tearful gratitude of Katrina shopping at a high-end clothing store with employees who actually wanted to help instead of mocking her, visions that occur to an audience that blur the line between actual magic and the ordinary, everyday magic from music.
The ending wraps up in a mad dash of demon fire and an alien battle in space, but before that is a chapter that’s mostly one musical performance. And I thought it was just beautiful. In one song Aoiki tells the story of an entire life, the ways it hurts, and the ways it transcends pain. She offers something comforting for anyone going through hell. And it all takes place in the movements of a violin piece, a poem in musical form.