An Exclusive Guest Post from Emily Itami, Author of Fault Lines — Our September Discover Pick!

1. Life is full of sliding door moments where we have to make choices for our future. Kiyoshi offers Mizuki a glimpse of a different sort of life, a freedom from the demands of marriage and motherhood. How did her character come to you?
Living in Tokyo when my children were small, I was surrounded by the most impeccable, beautifully presented mothers. I’d be in the sandpit covered in apple juice and lightly dusted with crisps, my children naked because they’d done something awful to their clothes or whatever, and these women were out of this world, smiling sweetly at their (dressed) kids and looking like they’d just stepped out of some fashion magazine. I felt like in the Western world, they’d be kind of iconic, or at least attracting admiration, but in Tokyo, nobody said anything — sometimes it felt like nobody even saw them.
I found the immediate experience of becoming a mother disorientating in many ways — the change from being an independent person who can interact with people because of your opinions or your choices or your behaviour, to being a vessel who was noticeable because she had a lot of stuff and her children were screaming, felt instantaneous and huge. One day you were a woman, and the next, you were a mother, even though inside, you were the same person, with the same non-PG thoughts and inconvenient rages and desires and everything else. Japan is still an old-fashioned society, with fairly rigid gender roles, and in Tokyo, it felt like that disconnect between the world of mothers and the world everyone else lives in was massively magnified. The idea of a Japanese woman experiencing that pull – of adoring her children and wanting to be a mother, but also wishing that she could be seen for who she is, a person separate to them, and narrating the hilarity and domestic tragedy of her life in her own sarky tones — played in my mind often, and Mizuki was born out of that.
 

2. Your descriptions of Tokyo, the food, the bustling streets, the cherry blossoms, are so lush and evocative. Mizuki’s newfound sense of freedom also seems to coincide with her exploring and falling in love with Tokyo again. How much did you draw on your experience of growing up there for this novel?

So much! I first started writing about Japan in creative writing assignments when I came back to England as a school child. I think I find it easier to pinpoint what I love about a place when I’m not there — I feel like I might not even have noticed my surroundings, or what my surroundings used to be like, in such acute detail if I hadn’t left them. I missed Japan like a relative, something I missed physically, and I think when I was younger I found it comforting to write myself back into what I could remember of it.
Growing up, I found the usual depictions of Japan quite unsatisfactory — I think things are changing and there’s more available now, but for a long time it felt as if programmes or writing about Japan focused either on the old, traditional aspects (beautiful tea ceremony with monks at a temple in snow-topped mountains) or the weird and wonderful (underwear vending machines and maid cafes). Neither of those depictions is untrue, but there was a whole world I loved so much that I couldn’t find, the quiet Tokyo neighbourhood I grew up in, the sense of community in each of the different areas, the exact feeling of being a child holding an adult’s hand at a night-time matsuri.
When I went back to Tokyo to live as an adult, I re-lived a lot of my childhood experiences with my own children, and also started to explore a whole other side to Tokyo; the restaurants, the nightlife, the architecture, the buzz, a culture and customs I didn’t notice as a child. It made me so happy cycling around Tokyo, passing skyscraper karaoke bars next to ancient public baths in run-down wooden one-story buildings, breathing in this place that was home and still had so much to discover. When I came back to London again, I had so much fun writing about all the places I love, that I wished I could go back to.
 

3. What books did you read while writing and researching this book?

The books that I aspired to were the ones with the most empathetic, funniest female voices, the books that made me feel less alone at times in my life when I needed to know that someone else had gone through whatever it was I was feeling, and done it with humour. I love the combination of humour and heartbreak with amazing observations, and I have books that I think nail those, that I re-read all the time. My Life on a Plate by India Knight, I don’t know How She Does It by Alison Pearson, Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple were some of my favourite re-reads when I was writing Fault Lines because they also write about motherhood and its attendant joy and frustrations with such warmth.
When I freaked out, which happened all the time, I’d try to get a grip by reading non-fiction about writing, which helped practically, but also in terms of just knowing that other people tried to write, freaked out, failed (and then succeeded, obviously!) and somehow managed to keep going anyway — Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert is always a solace, as is Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and I found Stephen King’s On Writing so clear and helpful.
 

4. Tell us more about your writing process. How did the last year’s pandemic, the isolation, affect the experience of writing and submitting your manuscript?

I was actually submitting the manuscript to agents in 2019, and did manage to meet my lovely agent Kirsty once before lockdown in early 2020, which I’m so happy about. It was such a weird experience knowing that it was being submitted to publishers during lockdown — it didn’t feel like a good time, and I was trying to be zen about the fact that coronavirus could kill the book and remember that this was evidently a very minor problem in the grand scale of things, but also wanting to throw a giant temper tantrum. Then some wonderful publishing houses, Phoenix Books, Custom House, Mondadori and Host, did show an interest, and the whole process was completely surreal — not only because even though we’re all used to it now, at the time trying to find an appropriate zoom background and threaten my children into absolute silence was a totally weird experience, but also because I was so insanely happy at a time when the global situation was definitely not that happy.
In terms of a writing process, I’m not that sure I can say I have one, exactly; before the pandemic, on the days when I wasn’t at work and the kids were at school I could sit and write uninterrupted for a few hours, but working with kids always means sometimes finding myself sitting at the bottom of the stairs trying to write something while they argue about Lego over my head and during the pandemic it was, as it was for everyone, a no-rules free-for-all with homeschooling, PE classes, breakfast, dinner, laundry and work all happening at the same time. I’d love to say it’s taught me something profound — I think mainly the thing it’s taught me is to really, really appreciate peace if ever it rocks up!
 

5. As booksellers, we love to ask: what are you reading and recommending right now?

I just finished Writers and Lovers by Lily King, which I loved. It felt so universal in the things it was describing, and every page made me laugh (or cringe) with recognition. I recently read Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton; I’ve never read anything like it. It was part memoir, part a kind of linguistic exploration, part philosophical musings. It’s the story of how the author went to Japan and fell in love with the country and the language, but also how difficult it is to be an outsider, and the ways in which language defines us, all written through fifty onomatopoeic Japanese words. I love Japanese onomatopoeia, and couldn’t actually believe this book existed. It’s intelligent and true and utterly brilliant. Also Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, which I found unbelievably well-observed and hilarious, and Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, who is an actual genius. How can she write such gut-wrenching truths about mental health breakdowns and relationships and make them so funny? I loved it.