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Erin:
How often do new volumes come out in Japan?
Yani:
Very often. Like three or four per year. This isn’t the
only thing she is writing, Kurimoto-san. It is amazing. The
Guin Saga is only like maybe a third of her total output.
Serdar:
What else does she write?
Yani:
She also has another series called Makai Suikoden.
Suikoden is one of the Chinese classics. So this is
“Tales of the Water Margin” with a Cthulu background.
Serdar:
I’m sold already. You’ve taken two of my fascinations
right there. Go get this for us!
Yani:
That’s fifteen volumes, I believe. There are side stories
to The Guin Saga, too. She is also very well known,
and well respected, awarded, as a mystery writer. She has a
detective novel series. And well, Kurimoto-san being Kurimoto-san,
she gives interesting slants in those. Like in one, there is
a hermaphrodite character in an old Japanese family. You know,
stuff like that.
And, of course, Kaoru Kurimoto is a pseudonym, a pen name. She
has another pseudonym, Azusa Nakajima, which is her name when
she writes as a critic. She actually made her debut as a literary
critic. In other words this very young critic right out of school
who was attracting a lot of attention from various quarters
started writing The Guin Saga as Kaoru Kurimoto. She
really is a success story. She has been on long-running television
quiz shows, too. She is celebrated in Japan.
She
was on one of my favorite quiz shows, Hinto de Pinto,
as Azusa Nakajima. There were five guys and five ladies on separate
teams competing every week. She was the captain of the ladies
team. It wasn’t until after I came to the States that
I realized they were the same people, Azusa and Kaoru.
Serdar:
In my case, I had actually heard about The Guin Saga
when I was doing research into science fiction and fantasy in
Japan on my own. I had actually gotten into Japanese pop culture
through Japanese high culture. I started with stuff like Kurosawa.
Then my friend brings over this tape: “Hey, there is this
movie Akira that you have to see.” It just spiraled
from there.
I started
to find out about the popular literary scene in Japan, not just
the stuff they write in hopes that they win the Nobel Prize.
I started seeing all these things, and getting very curious
about it. There were all these books, which simply never showed
up in English. During a discussion of a very long-running science
fiction series, Perry Rhodan, which is like hundreds
of books now, someone mentioned The Guin Saga. The
name stuck in my head and sort of stayed there for a little
bit, not really touching anything else for a while. Much later
on I bumped into an anthology book of fantasy cover art. There
was one of these, either Book One or Two. I can’t remember
for the life of me which one. I was looking at it thinking,
What is this? I had learned just enough Japanese at
that point to sound out Guin. And I smacked my forehead and
said, “All right, I have to find out what this is.”
Again I hit a wall. Then, around 2003, when the hardcovers started
coming out, I said, “All right, this is obviously something
that needs to be a mission for me.”
This
is the funny part: I went and grabbed the first volume in hardcover,
used. It was actually an ex-library edition, courtesy of Amazon.
Don’t kill me. It was very hard to find at that point.
I got up to about halfway through it, and then I had to throw
it in the trash. You see, the second half of the book was the
same as the first.
Yani:
Yeah. There was a printing mistake. About 3 percent of them
got misprinted. There was one batch where that happened.
Serdar:
I was just… I was just like… AHHHHH! I couldn’t
stand it because I was just getting hooked. I went back to Amazon.
This time I ordered all three of them from the same guy. Then
they arrived, and I blasted through all three of them. Then
I sat there and went, “Oh no, I ran out again!”
Then, I found out they were coming out in softcover, and they
were going to have the illustrations. I got through to the end
of Book Five, and I’m going, “Oh, they got me so
hooked.”
Yani:
At least it sort of has a kind of resolution.
Serdar:
Yeah, sort of, kind of. There is still so much stuff that is
left open-ended. If I can digress for a bit, this is one of
the things that sort of sets it apart from American-style fantasy.
The
form factor is important. You have a 300 page book which ends
on a cliff hanger. There is sort of a resolution. But you have
a lot of stuff left up in the air. You still don’t know
where Guin came from. We still don’t really know what
a lot of the other things that have been dropped or hinted at
in the background are about. So there is just enough of a resolution
to make you feel satisfied for the time being. You are still
hungry. You still want to go back for more. But with these other
books like Eragon, it is just like everything is in
one place, and that’s it. There is no mystery, no suspense,
and no urgency, nothing to make you feel like you have to keep
reading. And the form factor is part of that because when you’re
writing a book, that’s it, you have to lay it.
Yani:
I do admire Eragon, and not just because the guy is
a teenager. This is a successful novel that follows a certain
template. That template: it always has to start in a sleepy
town; there are some shady guys about, and the protagonist gets
involved, he has to run away. Then there are elves and dwarves.
It’s like there have to be elves and dwarves.
I’m
impressed on one level because he pulls it off, but on another
I’m like, “You’re so young, why do you have
to follow that traditional formula?”
Whereas
the weird thing is, The Guin Saga is following older-than-Tolkien
models—
Noah:
Right. It is the H. R. Haggard model.
Serdar:
And Robert E. Howard. I love that stuff.
Yani:
Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, and of course H. P. Lovecraft
too. So, she, this Japanese woman, is harking back to an American
tradition of fantasy. Whereas all these American fantasy writers,
the bestselling ones, like Jordan’s Wheel of Time,
they’re following a British model set up by Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis. They’ve forgotten the American roots of fantasy.
Kurimoto shows with this series that there is a lot there to
build on.
Serdar:
You pretty much took the words right out of my mouth. For her,
for everyone over there, the whole European model, the Howard
mode, the Cimmerian mode, it is alien to them. When you want
to do something really striking and original, the first thing
you want to do is get out of your comfort zone. You don’t
want to do the things that come naturally. You want to stretch
yourself a little bit and stick your neck out. One of the best
ways to do that is to go to a culture you don’t know about
and dive in. See what you come up with.
The
problem is: it is very difficult to do that. In publishing,
from what I can tell, that type of risk-taking is generally
not rewarded. It is like the movies: they want what took off
last year. That is what they deliver.
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Katoh’s painting of Guin