The introduction of my second novel, the thriller Neyuki, may seem a long way off, but like Under Shōko’s Bed, it has been with me for years.  It is actually the first novel I started writing.  I was working at another university then, a small school in rural Japan.  The faculty were a terribly dysfunctional lot and there were some people who over time gave every indication of being just plain bad.  It was the first time in my life I had ever worked with anyone like that, and it was quite disturbing.  So I started writing a novel as a sort of self-therapy to deal with all of the craziness.  A good friend, however, heard that a school in Tokyo was looking for someone.  She actually had to help me through the application process, as I was seriously depressed.  But I finished the application, they interviewed me, and I got the job.  Thanks to my friend, I have been happily living in Tokyo ever since.

With the move to Tokyo, my writing stopped for a couple of years.  But I couldn’t stay silent forever, and soon I was writing Under Shōko’s Bed, and when I had a couple of drafts of that done, I turned to Neyuki.  It was easy to write.  I simply thought of all the madness at my last job.  Perhaps the most difficult thing was to make sure I did not have specific people in mind as I wrote the various characters, but soon the characters were real enough to me that I was not thinking about any actual people.  Writing really is amazing in how it draws you in and fills your mind.  It’s a wonderful, sometimes almost other-worldly, experience.

Writing Neyuki, though, did not go so smoothly.  With a first draft complete, the dear friend who had been my muse through Under Shōko’s Bed and that first draft of Neyuki told me that she did not want to see Neyuki anymore, that she thought it was obscene.  (It did not offend others who read it.)  Perhaps I will write in a future post about losing my muse and what it took to start writing again, but let me just say it was traumatic.  It took years to return to it in earnest.  I did my best to make Neyuki less objectionable.  When it is introduced and reader reactions begin to come in, I will have a better idea of whether I succeeded in that, but my beta readers have not had trouble with it.  No matter the reaction, though, I think the novel is indeed disturbing, as it deals with the lengths to which people will go for money or power, and the depravity to which they will sink out of lust.  Even that, though, is often tied to money or power.  In a way I suppose I am lucky that I have little of either one.  And if I keep self-publishing novels, I think I am pretty well guaranteed to stay that way.