Wait, Japan Again?

The start of this post is going to make you want to punch me, but work through the anger and I’ll try to redeem myself, fair?

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Earlier this year I was lounging on a sailboat, floating 5 m off the sandy bottom in crystalline Bahamian waters, wondering what to do with my life. I’d been on that particular boat for maybe two months, traveling with an amenable group of boozy Colombians, cruising through the islands and generally accomplishing little more than bottles emptied and lobsters eaten. It was enjoyable, obviously, but I get restless after too much time in one place, even if that one place is a moving place going from one beautiful place to another beautiful place (which was what that place was doing).

I still had some money left (this was months ago) and I didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I’d hardly seen the world in my year-to-date of traveling, although I will gladly admit to having seen some awesome corners of it. I still hadn’t been to Africa or South America, and I wanted to accomplish something in 2017 – climb a mountain, meet an alien, get drunk with a shark, something fun. But nothing was jumping out at me; David, the captain, said “What’s next amigo?” and I had no good reply. I was disappointed in my lack… of what, I’m not sure… but I felt like I was letting everyone down by not doing Something, with a capital Some.

Then one night, as I rocked peacefully in my berth, I had a dream. I dreamt of space pirates and aliens and magic and gun fights and vampires. Freedom knights dueled robot tyrants while dragons and samurai schemed to overthrow the galactic hegemony. It was epic…

It was the continuation of the book I had started to write while spending a month at sea in 2016, crossing the Pacific. My mind, during that trip, had been set free from so many… strictures? chains? imagined boundaries? I had regular hallucinations and the most vivid dreams of my life. It was all, presumably, due to a lack of external stimulation as we drifted thousands of miles across empty ocean, my imagination substituting its own reality for the imposed content that ‘normal life’ usually burdens us with.

I woke up the next morning energized, excited.

“I need to go back to Japan,” I burped, scrounging in the fridge for a beer.

David nodded, knowingly.

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On the Pacific I had, at first, tried to write a spy novel. I figured that I could use all the exotic locations I’d visited as setting(s) for a Bond-esque global adventure. But after a few false starts I realized I was trying to force my story into a box that my imagination couldn’t squeeze into. Sure, spy novels might actually sell, but where were the Wizard Dragons of New Bangtown going to fit in? So I scrapped that idea and decided to let my imagination run free. I’d craft a story about any crazy shit I god-damn felt like, and if it didn’t fit into a conventional genre, then convention could suck goblin dong. I took the basic storyline I’d created for the spy novel (a sort of Carmen Sandiego lark, but with more sex and violence) and re-cast it with the characters that were filling my imagination; space pirates, vampires, witches, etc.

I wrote more than 100 pages of that book; it flowed out of my brain freely, like barf at a frat party. Similar to my own travel story, it started in Toronto and then moved to Central America, the scenes and characters based on the colourful input reality had provided me to date. I knew that it was a risk setting the story in Toronto because, other than Torontonians, no one cares about Toronto. But Toronto was home and I knew it back to front and I had this whole subplot about New York getting nuked to explain why anyone cool wouldn’t just move the 800 km to that city instead. The setting, naturally, faded into the background (there’s a witty comment there but I can’t find it) as the over-the-top characters and plot took to the fore; I was content.

Then, though; oh but then I arrived in Tokyo, and I knew I had been wrong. The setting mattered. Even people who live in Toronto would have trouble describing it in terms that could excite the imagination – ‘clean’, ‘safe’, and ‘glassy’ don’t cut it – but when I say Tokyo, your brain, regardless of having been there, immediately flies to bright lights, robots, flying cars, chicks with oversized boobs and cat ears, ninjas on rooftops, that sort of stuff. The city has saturated our imagination with years of cultural imagery; movies, news stories, graphic novels; filling in the details bigger and better than reality itself. Tokyo is exotic yet strangely familiar. It was exactly what I needed for my novel.

During that trip to Japan though, from August to October 2016, I barely sat in one place long enough to write a blog post, let alone work on my book. I spent maybe three weeks in Tokyo itself and otherwise explored the country north up to Hokkaido. It was a great trip, but not one suitable to writing and research. I enjoyed my time immensely then left, knowing I’d return but with no solid plans… after all, I’d spent three months there and it was a big world and I still had a lot of empty corners on my map.

Back to March 2017 and my revelation on the sailboat in the Bahamas. I finally had a goal – I would return to Tokyo, to research and write my book. Of course I couldn’t just take the easy route, so I traveled overland by train from Edinburgh, through Europe, Russia and Mongolia, to Shanghai, then took a ferry to Osaka, explored eastern Japan by rail, stopped in Yokohama long enough to randomly join a boat sailing back to China (Hong Kong), and finally boarded a plane to return to Tokyo, after a 20,000 km adventure by train and boat.

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I’ve been invited to live on a sailboat in Japan by good friends whom I was fortunate enough to meet last year. It’s the perfect set-up, a floating cottage away from the distractions of the city, yet close enough for a trip into Tokyo for research, fun, whatever. I’m just getting settled here and have yet to write a single new word of the book, but my month-ish so far in the country has filled a lot of gaps in my story and I’m excited to piece it all together. My current goal is to rough-finish a short story, by way of prologue to the actual novel, before I return to Canada around Christmas. Something bite-sized will give me a chance to solicit feedback on quality, style and content, before I commit (y’all know how I feel about commitments) to writing what will probably turn out to be ten novels on the subject.

So, that’s why I’m back in Japan, living on a sailboat; because I had a dream in the Caribbean about space pirates. It just took me a while to get here. Any questions?