The Importance of Being PC

Hi! For today’s blog entry, I wanted to talk about something more relevant to my writing as opposed to the DNC convention(Stephen Colbert trolling the DNC security is a must-watch) or whatever the weather is like outside (very hot, let’s just leave it at that).

Since ASURA NIGHT has been out for a few months, and the reviews continue to roll in through various methods and sites, I noticed that most of the reviewers touched upon something that never really occurred to me before.

The lack of Japanese “flavor” in the story.

They have noted that my version of Tokyo doesn’t seem that much different from their cities, that I don’t mention a lot about Japan nor do I talk about their customs, food, people, etc.

My reason for that is this:

If you have read the book, you will know that the main character is Japanese and has lived in Tokyo for all her life. Whatever she sees or experiences is not that strange to her. Everything is normal, so she’s not going to go to a izakaya and think “My, this little alley bar is great! I need more sake!” and etc. If I was writing about a character who was new to Japan, I certainly would have touched upon the various aspects of Japanese culture that differed from my character’s place of origin.  ((Besides, for a lot of Japanese people, it’s somewhat of a complex that they be as Western as possible. I’m not saying they go out of their way to ignore their culture, but they enjoy Starbucks Coffee, they like to go to whiskey bars if they can afford it, they like to be considered cosmopolitan. For example, it is uncommon to see a woman walking around in a kimono, although you will see this during the summer festival times, when they wear a yukata. This, wanting to be more Western/cosmopolitan, is something you see in Korea and China as well. They love anything imported and consider something from their culture to be rather outdated and old-fashioned.))

Mostly, I just wanted to write about a woman who, despite her location, could have had that incident anywhere. The location is not important to the story, it is incidental. The story could have taken place in Chicago, London or Seoul, but I chose Japan, mostly because of the whole “Asian woman” legend. Asian women being in the workforce is actually a pretty recent thing. For the longest time in Tokyo, most of the women were considered “coffee ladies”, meant to serve coffee/tea, tidy up the office space, look pretty, and…that was about it. I’m sure there are companies around where this is still prevalent. I wanted to put a woman who was fiercely competent, very dedicated to her life as a businesswoman, and make her go through all sorts of hell.

You’ll see a lot more of her transformation as a person in the next book EVOLUTION and her acceptance to the fate laid out for her in the last book REVOLUTION, both of which are plotted out. There is a 1/4 written draft of EVOLUTION floating around in my Dropbox account somewhere and I will get to it after I finish with the 1st draft of DARK MOON RISING and it is with my dev editor.

So, that’s it. The reason why I don’t go into detail about Japanese life, because it doesn’t matter, not for ASURA NIGHT. In the future, I may write a book about a woman who goes into Japan for the first time, but it probably won’t happen for quite some time.

I still have about a hundred other books to finish first.

Eek.