Gate to Kagoshima is a historical romance, very Outlander meets “The Last Samurai”. I appreciated the author’s deft hand at centering the story in its two timelines (though there’s a part of me that’s devastated to see the 2000s are historical enough to be a time placed in history with relics of old such as the Motorola Razr flip phone), and the thematic throughline of our protagonist, Isla, seeking out answers about her heritage and where a part of her comes from. 

However, my enjoyment of the novel was hindered by several other factors. Odd as it may sound, Kagoshima was a little too readable; the prose was so simplistic that it moved from an invisible vehicle by which to consume a story, one that required no remark one way or another, into something that aged down the book and made it feel like it was for a much younger audience. Were it not for the warfare and sex scenes, I’d call this novel accessible to middle-grade readers, and not nearly nuanced enough to get across the more harrowing elements of the story to its YA or adult audiences. 

This disconnect colored other elements of the story as well. The pacing of the novel was quick, which it had to be to cover the several elapsed months of the rebellion, but that left little to no room for “showing” characters’ emotional arcs or doing more than telling that time had passed. It was hard to feel a sense of narrative urgency while reading because Isla’s goal throughout was just… waiting. Waiting to meet her ancestor if possible, waiting to get back to her own time. She had no intermediary goals to carry her between any of those points, and she ended up just being swept along into a war that I as a reader had no time to begin caring about.
  

I wish Isla had been more proactive in figuring out about her ancestor instead of having the answer of it all fall into her lap. 2005 is modern enough that she should’ve been able to guess that she might be something of a “reverse ghost”, complete with western ideas of ghosts having unfinished business that prevents them from moving on. The things she’d do would make her more of an outsider, yes, but I need my protagonist to have some goal or agency or something to carry their own story. As it was, I couldn’t tell if Kuroki wanted to write a romance centering Isla and the samurai Kei or just a creative nonfiction piece about the Satsuma rebellion, because as soon as it was possible, the focus shifted to the latter in a way that made any bit of romance we got later on feel forced/out of place/surprising rather than satisfying. The scenes of warfare were a good change of pace in that they showed the interruption to life and accumulation of trauma, but because we were following an outsider instead of someone in Satsuma who had seen these sentiments brewing, it felt like it all happened so fast with no time to mourn characters we barely got to know anyway. By trying to play both games, I felt Gate to Kagoshima failed to deliver on either. 

Because of these large scale problems, I was more aware of smaller gripes throughout the story that I may otherwise have handwaved. 

The worldbuilding element of the time travel Yoshii gate not being tied to a specific location broke my immersion in that speculative fiction element (there has to be rules to the magic!). It could have been a good way to save Kei while the rebellion was failing—he needs to escort Isla back to the temple to be able to go home— but instead it just? Appears wherever? And sends Isla straight back to where she came from? And it only sometimes needs a storm to work, and sometimes it makes a musical sound you can follow. There was also inconsistency with the use of the honorifics, where some have dashes and some run into the name that they follow in a way that made the story just a little harder to read. Finally, I just felt the story hit one too many Outlander beats, down to calling Isla a gaijin, and I’m just not a fan when books are too similar to comp titles. It made this short book a slog to get through—if this weren’t an ARC I was reading for review, I would have DNFed.