Returning to the present, the narrator tries to piece together why Hattie was so cold to him.
The most powerful passages are those where Tolstoy slows time down to note each thought, gesture and feeling of Anna and her lover Vronsky, with a third entity present – the narrator – not only lodged deep in the two psyches, but standing back to tell us the ways in which one is misunderstanding the other.
The game is set in a Nippon (Japan) based on Japanese folklore, and begins with a flashback to events 100 years prior to the game's present; the narrator describes how Shiranui, a pure white wolf, and Nagi, a swordsman, together fought the eight-headed demon Orochi to save Kamiki Village and the maiden Nami, Nagi's beloved.
She hides her strength in dry lyrics that present a narrator who hopes for the best while seeing something less impressive around her: "Cool babies with soft operations holding my hand, throwing coins in my cup / Dusty numbers and public relations tell me to sit there and just shut up".
This narrator is John Neverbend.
(It is, by contrast, a little depressing to see another, Derek Jacobi, lending his imprimatur to this folly in the role of a present-day narrator).
His characters -- the present narrator is no exception -- routinely lie, mislead or pretend to be what they are not.
Only, this being Ocampo, by the time the story ends we are left with the suspicion, impalpable but present, that the narrator is herself a murderer.
On every page there are two tenses: the past of the character's actions and the present of the narrator's self-criticism.
If you get sick of those tedious period details (gas-lamp, chamber-pot, chandler — oy!), consider cutting between the past and the present, where the narrator discovers information about some ancestor's role in things.
