Anyone who wants to write well has to love language. You don't have to know what a gerung or a past-perfect predicate is, but you have to love sentences and paragraphs. Sharpshooters like Bradbury and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez can teach you to love the written word. Guys like Matheson and Stephen King can teach you how to tell a story.
Your novella collection, Mortal Engines and The Color of the Moon, includes a ghost horror story based on the classical Japanese kwaidanshu "Mimi Nashi Hoichi," or “Hoichi The Earless.” Would you tell us about this Japanese tradition and what compelled you to write about it?
The Color of the Moon is my riff on the classic Kwaidanshu “Hoichi The Earless,” a ghost story so famous it actually has a bronze monument to the monk-musician Hoichi in the part of Japan where it is alleged to have actually occurred. You can read about that here.
There are even Kabuki plays which reenact this famous Buddhist ghost story, as with many other kwaidanshu. My version, although changed greatly into an erotic love story gone bad is still set in medieval Japan about 1181 AD with roughly the same characters and issues. It took me ten years off and on to write The Color of the Moon, published by Whisky Creek Press Torrid. The early drafts were strongly influenced by a Japanese lady named Mire Uno who lived in Miyazaki Japan. She had a website but it doesn't seem to be up anymore. There you can read classical Japanese ghost stories which I helped her edit. I met her online when I was researching the background for The Color of the Moon and sent her my first draft. From a historical viewpoint, my first draft was completely off the rails and she let me know it. She knew a lot about that part of Japanese history and straightened me out on the technical and cultural details. So for the most part, my final depiction of social customs in medieval Japan is historically accurate because of her, which I think gives the story a gravity and realism it wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Japan has a tradition of classical ghost stories (Kwaidanshu) going back hundreds of years. Lately they have been revived in the West as popular horror movies. The Ring and The Grudge are western rebuilts of Japanese horror movies (such as “Ju-On”) which in turn are modern retellings of ancient kwaidan such as “Okiku” and “The Peony Lantern,” which every Japanese kid grows up hearing at their grandma's knee. So without knowing it, Americans are being exposed indirectly to Japanese Kwaidanshu in the movies.
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