Book Clever

I was all set up and ready to give this book a 5. I really loved the writing style, the story, the characters, everything (even if at first I had my doubts with all the Japanese words thrown around; there is, after all, a fine line between rightful tossing of foreign words and sounding like you're writing fanfic, but I feel the author managed a good enough balance, all things given). Anyhow, it was a pretty awesome book, in all.
What finally made me drop one star was the whole kidnapping thing. It wasn't that I hated the idea or anything, I think it was a good bit of drama to throw in and make things interesting, but it felt like it went a bit overboard with the whole torturing thing. While I can understand the motivation behind the bad guy's reason for all the rape torture, I do feel it was kind of exaggerated and didn't fancy reading the way it was handled when he was finally rescued. I do have to say though, I really enjoyed Kenshin not being a wimp and actually trying to do things for himself.