Red Sorghum: Historical fiction or magic realism?

In the end, or near the end, of My Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum (Howard Goldblatt, tr.) I may have oversold this work in my enthusiasm about the first section; going through the novel, now nearly at the end, I have to say that the graphic detail of violence and putrefaction becomes repetitious and overbearing - and the many complex relationships among the various military factions (some of which are political, others are just banditry) that fight one another for control of the region (Shandong Province) gets ever more complex and confusing, at least for this poor reader. I admire MY's creative narration, which keeps circling back to a single epochal event - the massacre at Blackwater River Bridge of the troops the narrator's grandfather led - but perhaps a straightforward narration would have helped readers, or this reader anyway. That said, there's no question that the writing is powerful and we have to suppose that, exaggerations aside (and there are many - it would be impossible to live through the wounds and injuries that the soldiers suffered; likewise, the heroic defenses and the perfect shots push this narrative toward magic realism), this does seem to be the author's attempt to bring the attention of the world to the atrocities that rural families and communities endured during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s and 40s. This plot element reaches it's apex in the final (5th) chapter or section, in which MY depicts in graphic detail the day in which the invading Japanese forces gang raped his grandmother, then a young and pregnant mother, in the presence of her young daughter. He flinches at nothing, and in this instance breaks the 4th wall and addresses the reader directly as an aggrieved witness to history - at this point the novel, for all its extremities, approaches the mode of historical fiction.