Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Lian Hearn
Lian Hearn first came to prominence in 2002 through her five- book Tales of the Otori series, a group of fantasy novels set in a world inspired by medieval Japan. (Her name is a pseudonym; previously, she had written a number of books for younger readers under her real name.) Her latest project is The Tale of Shikanoko, a series of four books using a similar approach, set in world similar to but quite distinct from the medieval Japan of history. In it, Hearn establishes an intricate plotline and explores the nature of heroism.
In some ways, Shikanoko is an archetypal hero: after an attempt is made on his life by those wishing to deprive him of his inheritance, he retreats to the forest, where he learns an array of skills and abilities, including some that venture into the supernatural. Eventually, he becomes part of a wider conflict involving lines of succession, mystical creatures, and betrayals. But Shikanoko is a more ambiguous character as well, moving out of a morally gray role over the course of Emperor of the Eight Islands, the first book in the series, and then discovering his capacity for much more horrific acts.
I reached Hearn via Skype at her home in Australia. Over the course of our conversation, we discussed everything from the influence of medieval Japanese literature on her fiction to her fondness for the Tournament of Books. An edited version of our conversation follows. —Tobias Carroll
The Barnes & Noble Review: When you were beginning to work on The Tale of Shikanoko, what came to mind first? Was it the characters, the setting, or the central conflict? Was there even one element that came before everything else?
Lian Hearn: I was really interested in the central character. The idea for that came when I was in Japan about five years. I went up to Tohoku, where I hadn't been before, with some friends. We went to see two forms of folk dancing, and I was very struck by the costumes and the masks that the men wore in the performances — the feeling of how being masked and being costumed changes your personality. There was one particular young man whom we spoke to afterwards who had had somehow been changed into something so formal and so courteous. I was really struck by the way that the dance itself transforms the dancers, as well as being something from a very ancient tradition.
I came home with that idea in my mind. It's always really hard to know with my books, because one thing leads to another, and I don't plot out formally — I just let the whole thing emerge. Some fans had also contacted me to ask me about someone who's mentioned in Heaven's Net Is Wide, one of the Tales of the Otori novels. He's a legendary hero, Takeyoshi. They wanted to know his story; it ties up with how the Otori sword was forged and where the tribe comes from. All of those things were working together in my mind. The main character came out, and I could tell that he was going to be one of these rather rough young men who has to go through various transformations in order to become the person who he's meant to be. So that was my central character.
It's interesting — when I was at university, I did Spanish and French as my subjects, and I've always really loved the play Life Is a Dream, by Calderón. In a way, the Shikanoko character is a bit like Segismundo from that play, in that you have this very rough person who is somehow the hero and yet is a very antihero sort of person who has to be transformed. It was only after I had finished writing that I made that connection.
BNR: For all that Shikanoko has a traditionally heroic back-story, he also ends up in a very dark place by the end of the first book, and the second book is much more about him wrestling with what he has the capacity to do.
LH: That's very true. The second book is much more of a redemption story, and how he comes back from that dark place. A lot of years had to pass so that Takeyoshi could grow up.
BNR: Whether they're sympathetic to or antagonistic towards the protagonist, you show off the human side of nearly all of your characters. The Prince Abbot emerges as one of the more openly villainous characters in the books — what was the reason for having a character like that?
LH: Everybody in the book has the makings of power. That's what interests me in the books, rather than the more traditional good and evil: what human beings do in their quest for power. I suppose the Prince Abbot is the most powerful character in the first two books, and so he represents this sort of institutionalized power. He has spent many, many years building up that power, and he's not going to relinquish it quickly. I don't know if he has any redeeming features or not. My friend who read the books very early for me, whom I mention in the Acknowledgements, Randy Schadel — he was very fond of the Prince Abbot as a character. He was his favorite character. I think certain people will like him, too. All of the other characters are all flawed. But as you say, they have a humanity about them. There's nobody else who is evil through and through.
BNR: There's also something that is, in its own way, appealing about characters who are aware of, and embrace, their own capacity for villainy in a situation like this and aren't necessarily torn about moral decisions.
LH: I think so, yes. I think this is why we admire people who, we think, are certain of themselves and don't agonize over whether they should do this or do that. They just go ahead and act. I think that can be a very attractive personality trait. We do follow people like that when they occupy positions of great power. The Prince Abbot certainly has that. He's certain that the way he thinks is the right way for people to be. In that hierarchy, he's up at the top, and he wants things to stay the way they are and the way that he wants them.
BNR: The books are all being released in the United States over the course of a year. Did you write them all as one work and then find the breaking points, or did you take small breaks between the writing of each of them?
LH: I wrote the one thing as one long story, and then I realized that it would fold into two parts. In Australia and the U.K., it's coming out in two volumes. It will be called Emperor of the Eight Islands and Lord of the Dark Wood. I'd worked with Sean McDonald before, and I think he's a fantastic publisher. When he was at Riverhead, he did the last two of the Otori books with me. When he suggested doing them as four short books — they were already in four parts, because each of the two books had two parts — I felt that that was a really great idea. I thought that it could work really well, to do them all in the one year, although it has been incredibly difficult doing all the various copy editing and proofreading for the books, simultaneously in three countries.
BNR: In your Author's Note, you write about taking inspiration from "the great warrior tales of medieval Japan." What were you looking to take from each — motifs, a sense of history, or something societal?
LH: I really love the emotional content of things like The Tales of the Heiki and The Tale of the Soga Brothers. The way that a whole world is in there. They're very sophisticated and very deep in their portrayal of ambition and revenge and all of the striving, clan against clan and so on. One of the things I really liked is the way that the spiritual world, the world of supernatural animals, and the world of nature all intertwine in these tales. You have a sense of these very ancient rules and the spiritual beings, and they're all in this one world, immersed in it. I wanted to get that feeling of being immersed in a world where magic and spiritual things happen all the time. No one's surprised by them; they have to take them into account in their lives.
BNR: Earlier, you talked about taking inspiration from a dance performance that prominently featured masks. Is that where the idea of the deer mask, which plays a significant role in the books, came from?
LH: Yes, very much. I also read a lot about the making of ritual shamanistic masks in Asia and in Japan in the medieval period — the use of skulls of animals and humans, and making it by passing it through the incense and the fires and so on. I found all of that really interesting. I used the deer mask for that.
BNR: In terms of the use of magic in the books — there's one case late in Emperor of the Eight Islands where a character is killed but is able to potentially evade death. Dramatically speaking, how do you maintain tension when there is a way to return from being killed in some way?
LH: I do somewhat address that in the second book. That's a very specific one-off event, and I think it's explained by a combination of circumstances that enable that particular character to return as a spirit inside of a horse. For most people, when they die, they die — that's it. Being able to call Kiyiyori's spirit back was a combination of Taro being there, dying at the same time, to take his place, and the fact that Shikanoko found that he had the power to summon that spirit back. There are many references in the books I read to things like "spirit return incense" and "spirit return ritual." I think it is something that appeals enormously to the human psyche. I don't have anybody else returning — only the one.
BNR: Has having grown up in one country and then moving to an entirely different country had any effect on the way that you think about place? Has it had any effect on your writing?
LH: I think it has, very much. I was born in England, and then my parents lived in West Africa when I was a teenager. My mother and my father divorced when I was eleven or twelve, and after that time I felt that I had no family home in England any more, because my mother was overseas with my stepfather. When I started learning languages and spending a lot of time in France and Spain, as well as going to Nigeria once a year for school holidays, I felt as if I was always somebody adrift, somebody who had no place and no home. It was incredibly important to me, as a child. And then I ended up being an even farther-away exile in Australia.
I wrote children's books for years, as you may have seen, under my own name, Gillian Rubinstein. Those books, even the picture book tales, are all about searching for a home, of being lost and trying to find your way home. When I went to Japan for the first time, maybe it was that it's a Northern Hemisphere country, and it satisfied my longing for the Northern Hemisphere light and landscape, but I fell in love with it. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe it's still my quest to find somewhere where I feel at home. It always has been part of writing — having a sense of wanting to attach myself to somewhere. I also think that's one of the reasons why I love learning languages. That's another way to give yourself another identity, to learn the language of a place you're living in.
BNR: Do you find that you write differently when using your own name, as opposed to a pseudonym?
LH: I don't really write under my own name any more. I haven't written a children's book for fifteen years or so. But I think that when you write for adults — I found it a lot easier. You're writing with the brakes off; you're not constantly editing in your head about what might or might not be suitable for your age group. For me, it was very liberating, writing like that. I do think that, going back to this question of exile, I started writing for children when I came to Australia because I was learning Australian culture through my own children. As they were growing up in it, I was learning that culture as well, so that was where I felt comfortable writing. And then they grew up and left home, and I started writing about Japan. I'm not sure what that means.
BNR: How have your feelings about Japan changed as you've written more books set in a version of it?
LH: Every time I go back to Japan, or every time I start writing another book, I feel that it's much deeper and richer. I've found out more, I've understood a little more, or I've realized that there's so much that I don't understand, even more. I'm constantly trying to get to the bottom of the mystery that is, for me, Japanese history and culture. When I was about seventeen, I saw the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, which made a huge impression on me. There's a line in that, which is, "If you pay attention, you will understand." For me, the whole thing about Japan is that I think that is incredibly true about Japanese culture. It's very much about paying attention and noticing details and picking up on nuances and things.
BNR: Do you foresee yourself writing something for adults with a setting other than medieval Japan, or a version of it?
LH: I wrote two straight historical novels, Blossoms and Shadows and The Storyteller and His Three Daughters. I wrote Blossoms and Shadows about the Meiji Restoration, the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It's quite a long novel, quite a dense novel. When I wrote the second book, I was also very, very happy with how it turned out, but again, it didn't have anything like the impact of my medieval fantasy novels.
I'm not sure what I'll do next. At the moment, I'm in that stage where I'm thinking, maybe I'll start something else; maybe I'll do something completely different. I get a lot of requests from people saying, "Please tell us more about the characters that are still alive at the end of The Harsh Cry of the Heron." And I did start writing something along those lines last year. I haven't had time to get back to it. Probably this winter. Winter, I find, is when I do most of my creative writing. I'll see what happens over the next few months.
BNR: Are there aspects of Japanese culture that you've come across in your writing or research that have made you want to investigate them more deply?
LH: When I started writing Across the Nightingale Floor, maybe I was more naive and more obsessed with the more superficial elements — the color and the movement, if you like, and the glamorousness of the samurai and everything. I think that, as I've learned more of the history, I've gotten more realistic. I think that Emperor of the Eight Islands is possibly a darker book than the earlier ones. That's not because I think that anything is particularly dark. It's more to do with the way that I'm viewing the world. It's all got more complicated, more complex. I think that always happens when start learning a language and you start reading the history of a country in its own language. You get a lot more depth to your understanding than when you're just seeing it through the English-language mirror.
BNR: When you're creating a world based on a historical place and time, do you have to establish a point where that world's history diverges from what we know?
LH: I sort of arbitrarily choose my own history in the sense of events. I don't really tie things to Japanese historical events. But I do try to keep very close to the social history: what people were wearing, what they might have been eating. All of that background stuff, I use the details to build out my world so that it seems realistic or real. I don't actually take any historical events. Although I guess there could be some echoes of things that actually did happen. I found, when I was writing Tales of the Otori, that I arbitrarily said, if it were Japanese history, it would be this date. Therefore, these things would be going on as the background, but I'm going to make up my own history entirely. That seemed to be the way that it worked for me.
BNR: When you're in the middle of writing something, do you find that it changes your reading habits at all? Are you generally reading for research in the middle of writing, or do you stay with work that's far removed from what you're writing?
LH: I'm an addictive reader of novels. I read all the time. At one stage, I was trying not to read fiction when I was writing it, because I found that the voice overlapped too much. But because I read mostly modern literary fiction, there's not an awful lot of overlap of voice at the moment.
I try to read a lot [in] Japanese, even though it's very slow for me to read Japanese novels. Just to try to get a sense of the voice and the way that the language is used. I just finished reading Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. It absolutely shattered me. It was so fantastic. He's writing about Chechnya in a way that you would swear he had grown up there. I was very impressed by that ability to present a different culture so completely and wonderfully. Before that, I read The Sellout, which was wonderful. I follow the Tournament of Books, and I get a lot of my recommendations from there.
—June 8, 2016
