Reading the first Twelve Kingdoms novel

Although the basic plot seems to be the same, it is moderately different from the anime. I've heard some of the choices the anime made criticised, the one that's even more obvious reading the book is the bizarre choice to keep the plot point that Yoko's appearance changes, but not actually change her appearance. Here she is with "dark red-brown hair" and here she is with vividly bright red hair and completely different features (if you can't see the pictures: she has the same face and dark-ish red hair in both :))

But this really is a clunky translation. I'll see if I can dig up some of the better fan translations for the other books since they're not in the library system regardless.