68 pages • 2 hours read
Ryka AokiLight from Uncommon Stars
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Katrina Nguyen
Katrina Nguyen is one of the three main protagonists in Light From Uncommon Stars. She is a transgender teenage girl who comes from an abusive background, and as a result, she suffers from severe anxiety and self-doubt. The novel explores the theme of Identity and the Struggle for Self-Acceptance through her character growth as she studies the violin under Shizuka. Katrina’s compassionate and courageous personality leads Shizuka to see the young woman as a daughter, and Shizuka decides not to sacrifice Katrina to Hell as she initially intended. While Katrina’s gender identity is a source of anguish for her in the beginning, it also gives her the ability to create world-changing music and makes her uniquely resistant to the temptations that others fall prey to.
As Shizuka observes, Katrina’s transgender experience shapes every aspect of her violin playing:
[H]er tonality had been honed by a lifetime of being concerned with her voice. Her fingertips were liquid, born of years of not wanting her hands to make ugly motions. And her ability to play to a crowd, project emotion, follow physical cues? Katrina had trained in that most of all (316).
When Shirley suggests using alien technology to modify Katrina’s body to be more traditionally feminine, Katrina rejects the idea, saying that she would have to relearn the violin all over. Katrina’s unconventional training distinguishes her from traditionally trained students such as Tamiko Grohl and Shizuka’s previous six students. Most notably, Katrina is less susceptible to the temptations that destroyed them. Those students already believed that they were brilliant and deserving of success and thus were willing to trade anything to achieve their ambitions. In contrast, Katrina plays her music purely to express herself and share beauty. When Shizuka tries to build up Katrina’s ego by asking her how it felt to be applauded, Katrina says, “I felt like no one was going to hurt me. I felt safe, Miss Satomi. And powerful. So powerful that I could keep you, and everyone who was listening, safe as well” (222). This response, so different from anything Shizuka’s past self-centered students might have said, stuns her.
Katrina’s relationship with Shizuka, which contrasts powerfully with her relationship with her biological mother, ties into the theme of The Influence of Parents on Children. Though very different, Katrina’s experiences mirror those of Shizuka, who grew up yearning to play music that would change the world but found that people were more interested in exploiting her instead. However, unlike Shizuka, Katrina is exploited from the very beginning, not because of her music but because of her gender identity. While Shizuka lost her music in the effort to free herself from that exploitation, Katrina eventually frees herself through the power of her music. Shizuka’s lessons, combined with her kindness and acceptance, are key to Katrina coming to see herself as worthy. In turn, Katrina becomes more than capable of expanding on Shizuka’s legacy, giving Shizuka the courage to sacrifice herself.
Katrina learns to channel her experiences of rejection, isolation, and self-hatred through the violin in a way that connects to everyone who listens, even those who have not had the same experiences. Her character growth culminates in her performance at the music competition, in which she plays the same Bartók piece that Shizuka had performed on the night she lost her soul. Through this piece, which features many “in-between” notes, Katrina is finally able to tell the world who she is. Katrina’s ability to channel her experiences as a transgender woman through art and connect with her audience in a universally human way reflects what Ryka Aoki herself has stated she hopes to achieve with her writing.
Shizuka Satomi
Shizuka Satomi, also known as the “Queen of Hell,” is the second major protagonist of the book. Once a talented violin performer, she developed a condition in her hand that left her unable to play. Desperate to regain her music, she sold her soul to the demon Tremon Philippe. However, on the night the deal would have been sealed, Shizuka fled the stage mid-performance and left her soul in limbo. Tremon agreed to free her soul if she delivered him the souls of seven more musicians, and he granted her 49 years to fulfill her contract. While under the contract, Shizuka stopped aging and gained some subtle supernatural powers; the cost, though, was that any records of her musical performances were erased from the Earth, and she was cursed to be unable to perform for others. Prior to the start of the novel, Shizuka has trained six other legendary violin students, each ultimately damned to Hell. She is an almost mythical figure in the violin world, and conspiracy theories online speculate that she has been selling her students’ souls to the devil.
Initially, Shizuka comes across as charismatic and relatable despite seeming ruthless. The exact details of how she entered into her deal with Tremon are not revealed until nearly the end of the book, leaving the reader to speculate about what her true motivations are. It is implied that she sacrificed her previous students without remorse. The most striking example is her sixth student, Yifeng Zheng, who seemed so close to her that some wondered if they were in a romantic relationship, yet Tremon recalls that “her expression as the Zheng boy was fed to the flames of Hell […] had been worthy of any demon” (140).
Nonetheless, it is clear from early on that Shizuka is far from heartless. Her infatuation with Lan is innocent and sweet, and she instinctively shows compassion for Katrina from the moment she sees her sleeping in the park. Shizuka then continues to treat Katrina with kindness and respect, viewing her gender identity as an ordinary aspect of who Katrina is. Shizuka’s kindness, which allows Katrina to begin her journey of self-actualization, seems to contradict the idea of a woman who would sell her students’ souls to Hell. As Shizuka’s backstory and motivations come to light, though, it becomes clear that Shizuka is as much of a victim as her former students were.
Shizuka became convinced that the only way to save herself—and more importantly, her music—was through sacrificing others. She came to view music selfishly, which allowed her to emotionally distance herself from her former students, who also chose to sell their souls for the promise of others listening to their music. But with Katrina, Shizuka’s rationale falls apart. Katrina has no self-centered ambition; she only wants to give beauty to the world, a goal that Shizuka lost sight of along the way. Katrina introduces Shizuka to the game NetherTale, in which the player can choose to escape from Hell without killing anyone. At first Shizuka believes this idea to be naïve and unrealistic, but as her love for Katrina changes her perspective, she adopts it as her goal. In the end, because of her relationships with Katrina and Lan Tran, Shizuka is able to recover The Transformative Power of Music. She thereby does the impossible, escaping from Hell without sacrificing others, and goes on to play her music to the stars.
Lan Tran
Lan Tran is the third protagonist of Light From Uncommon Stars and the love interest to Shizuka. While she appears to be an ordinary donut shop lady just trying to support her family of immigrant refugees, she is actually a plum-colored space alien recently escaped from a collapsing Galactic Empire. When we are first introduced to Lan’s family, her son Markus refers to her as “captain,” and she addresses him as “lieutenant” (22). The twins Windee and Edwin debate whether they should call her “captain” or “mom” (23). Only Lan’s eldest daughter, Shirley, consistently refers to her as “mother.” In short, while Lan is a loving and protective mother, she can be somewhat emotionally distant from her children.
Lan maintains a careful façade for her children’s sake, trying to give them a sense of stability; in this sense, her character arc is key to theme of The Struggles of Refugees and Outsiders. In a flashback where she recalls their escape from the Empire, she tells herself “Keep smiling. Keep smiling to make it fun for the kids. Of course they must know. But they cannot know. They cannot know. They cannot know how much you will miss everything you are leaving behind” (193). Lan does not realize that this suppression of her emotions is taking a heavy toll on her own mental wellbeing as well as her family’s. Aunty Floresta notices that Edwin, a more intuitive and emotional boy than his twin sister, is especially distant from his mother. The older son, Markus, grows increasingly resentful and angry, eventually lashing out in violence against two human teenagers. Lan sees Markus’s growing rage but fails to connect with and stop him. Lan’s greatest shortcoming occurs with Shirley. Because Shirley is a sentient computer program, her mother often dehumanizes her and acts embarrassed about her existence—something that Katrina relates to her own parents’ reactions to her being transgender. Lan reveals further trauma surrounding Shirley’s birth, as the “real” Shirley was originally a stillborn child. Lan eventually reevaluates her relationship with Shirley and learns to respect her, albeit after a harsh confrontation with Shizuka.
Lan’s romantic relationship with Shizuka provides her only outlet to drop her façade as the “captain” and enjoy simple pleasures like feeding ducks or eating eggplant parmigiana at Olive Garden. In spite of their mutual love, Lan and Shizuka must overcome a number of hurdles in their relationship. Lan at first has a habit of not really listening to Shizuka and trivializing the things she values. To Lan, things like music and food are unimportant when compared to big-picture problems like the Galactic Empire’s collapse and the threat of the Endplague. Lan’s dismissive attitude toward Shizuka is one of the factors that leads them to briefly breaking up. After they rekindle their relationship, though, Lan makes more of an effort to truly listen to Shizuka and appreciate the value of music and food. Opening her mind more to these human experiences, Lan eventually concludes that the cure for the Endplague lies in the seemingly trivial beauty of music.
Lucy Matía
Aside from the three main protagonists, the most significant character is Lucy Matía, a descendant of the once-famous Matía family of violin luthiers. She still runs her family’s shop, but it has lost the reputation it once had when run by her father and grandfather. Since she was a child, Lucy had a natural talent for repairing and building violins, but the Matías were a patriarchal family who refused to accept Lucy as an heir because of her gender. Her grandfather, Catalin, whose portrait still hangs over Lucy’s workshop, was a tyrannical figure who convinced Lucy from a young age that the family’s work was “not the sort of thing for little girls” (249). Similar to Katrina, Lucy suffers from a debilitating lack of self-confidence thanks to the abuse of her family. But when Shizuka pressures her into repairing Katrina’s violin, Lucy starts to rediscover her natural talents, and with it the confidence to defy her grandfather’s influence and become the true heir of the Matía family’s legacy. Lucy’s son, Andrew, though at first uninterested in taking over the family business, is inspired by his mother’s skill and asks Lucy to teach him as well.
Twice in Lucy’s story, she encounters past incidents in which a talented woman like herself was buried in history because of her gender. First, Shizuka brings Lucy a valuable Guarneri del Gesù violin, knowing that it will force Lucy to dig up her grandfather and father’s old client notes. When Lucy does so, she discovers that the violin was actually made by del Gesù’s wife Katarina: “[A]s the master faded, she completed, and even built, many Guarneri violins on her own. But throughout history, many of those instruments had their labels removed or altered, because no one would buy a violin made by a woman” (248). Later, in the second instance, Tremon Philippe reveals to Lucy that her family are the descendants of the famous Amati family, “the first and eldest” (220) of the legendary names in violin history. But centuries ago, the Amati family had a genius daughter whose legacy was also stolen because of her gender: “[H]er brilliant work is ascribed to her brothers, her uncles, even Nicolò himself, while her name and existence are erased” (360). Seeing this injustice, Heaven blessed the forgotten Amati daughter with the promise that her lineage would survive forever, but her family would be forced to leave Italy and forget their true name.
Lucy’s experiences, and the experiences of Katarina Guarneri and the forgotten Amati daughter, connect to the novel’s exploration of legacy and the struggle for self-acceptance. Just as Katrina’s world-changing music was nearly lost because of her transgender identity, the work of these talented women is nearly erased from history because of the prejudiced views of their families. In the end, the Matía legacy lives on only because Lucy chooses to reject these views, allowing her skills to flourish as they were always meant to.
