So Far Away, Yet So Close to Home (by Laura Joh Rowland)

 

So Far Away, Yet So Close to Home

by Laura Joh Rowland

    I set my mystery series in historic Japan because I wanted to explore a place that was distant in space, time, and culture from my own.  Little did I then realize that the distance between two widely spaced points can be a very short line, and the line between author and story is quite blurry.
 
            “We shall not cease from exploration
            And the end of all our exploring
            Will be to arrive where we started
            And know the place for the first time.”

    T.S. Eliot said it better than I can, but I won’t let that stop me from describing how my own life keeps cropping up in my novels about a samurai detective named Sano Ichiro.  He lives in Edo, the biggest city in 17th century Japan, which was famous for its artists, entertainers, sexual excesses, criminals, and corrupt politicians.  I live in New Orleans, the biggest city in Louisiana, which is famous for . . .  Well, you get the idea.

    When I was researching the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the licensed brothel district that appears in many of my books, what I found struck a familiar note.  I knew those narrow streets filled with music, taverns, noisy revelers, and parades.  That “nightless city” where the party never ends and the very air breathes forbidden thrills.  It was New Orleans’s French Quarter, transported around the world and back in time 300 years.  Read between the lines of my scenes set in Yoshiwara, and you’ll see (and smell) Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street.  I dare say the courtesans of Yoshiwara couldn’t hold a candle to some New Orleans drag queens. 

    Sometimes major events taking place in my time intrude on Sano’s.  After the September 11 terrorist attacks, I heard about authors who’d had to rewrite their books because life in New York and in other contemporary American settings they used had changed so dramatically.  I thought how fortunate I was to have set my own stories in the past, which couldn’t be touched by present day tragedies.  When the Iraq war began, I thought of my books as a haven insulated from the violence.

    That’s what I thought, until I noticed a strange thing about my recent work.  The political strife between two rivals, Chamberlain Yanagisawa and Lord Matsudaira, had escalated from covert attacks in The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria and The Dragon King’s Palace to outright war in The Perfumed Sleeve.  The Edo portrayed in The Assassin’s Touch bears an uncanny resemblance to Baghdad after the American invasion.  I had unconsciously mirrored recent facts in my historical fiction.

    Sometimes my books are eerily prophetic.  In The Assassin’s Touch, I described a bad rainy season that flooded Edo.  A month after the book was published, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.  My house got two and a half feet of water in the lowest level.  The wind blew out a big hole in the roof.  Many of my worldly goods went for a serious swim.  The day before the storm, my husband Marty and I and our three cats had headed north, to stay with our families in Michigan.  There we anxiously waited for word on when it would be safe to go home.

    Like everyone else from New Orleans who evacuated for the hurricane, I thought I would be gone, oh, a few days.  I ended up living in Michigan for almost four months.  At first I spent my time sitting glued to the TV, watching the horror story unfold in New Orleans; on the phone to insurance companies; and on the Internet, trying desperately to track down my friends.  Some were scattered across the country, others trapped in the flooded city.  Then came the next chaotic phase, when Marty was called back to his job at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.  We launched a frantic effort to get our house repaired enough to live in before he ran out of temporary places to stay.  That involved cleaning tons of wet, moldy, ruined stuff out of our house, hiring an army of contractors to repair the damage, and fighting a nervous breakdown.  All the while, as I watched autumn turn to winter in Michigan, I knew that when we did return permanently to New Orleans, we would find friends gone, our neighborhood a ghost town, and life altered beyond recognition.  Those were some of coldest, darkest days I’ve ever known.

    To take my mind off my troubles (and because I needed to earn money to pay the contractors), I began writing the twelfth book in my series, titled The Snow Empress.  In it, Sano and his wife Reiko and some friends head up north in the winter, to the island of Ezogashima (now known as Hokkaido) to sort out some problems that include a murder.  Sano and Reiko’s young son has been kidnapped and sent into the middle of all the trouble.  Those are some of the coldest, darkest days they’ve ever known.

    I went back to New Orleans, with Sano and company.  By the time The Snow Empress was finished, so was most of the work on my house.  New Orleans was heaped with trash, mortally wounded,  and struggling to rise again.  I thought I’d finished writing about my Hurricane Katrina experience . . . until I began my new book, The Fire Kimono.

    This episode in Sano’s adventures involves a murder that took place during the Great Fire of 1657.  Over 100,000 people died in that fire, and almost the whole city of Edo was destroyed.  It makes Hurricane Katrina look like a picnic in the park.  But the two disasters had much in common, such as flaws in city planning and infrastructure that worsened the problems, and the heroics and crimes that occurred during and afterward.

    I’ve gotten used to the fact that Sano and I live in parallel universes.  Never the two shall meet, but what happens in mine reflects in his.  With each new book I set out to explore 17th century Japan.  Each time I arrive back in my own territory.  And I know my own world in a way that I never would had I not written it into my books.

    

Comments

[sandieherron]

Hi Laura! I am so sad that you were so affected by the horrors of hurricane Katrina. I live in Sarasota, FL and prepare for many hurricanes that pass by us or slightly miss. We've just finished renovating our home as well, although ours was by choice. We made sure to get impact glass windows and doors and build everything to withstand hurricane force winds.

It must have been just horrid to sit in Michigan wondering what was happening during and after. It is very interesting to read your post above explaining how all these current events made their way into your books even tho 300 years earlier. I bet I'll read those books with a different viewpoint now, looking for similarilties. I'm sure it won't spoil the story, for you write so beautifully.

I recall a piece of art that you painted auctioned off at the Milwaukee Bouchercon, and it was quite gorgeous. The painting you show above is also gorgeous and quite detailed. It must have taken some time to put that together. I hope you enjoy the process as much as the result.

I'm glad to know your home is restored to its former glory and you are again writing in your own place. I wonder how the stories will go now that Edo has been mostly destroyed? I bet it will rebuild, just as New Orleans is re-building.

All the best to you, and happy Thanksgiving!
Sandie Herron
Sarasota, FL