Fair to say that things have not been the same since the last report I rounded up. And will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Not gonna dwell on the impact of COVID-19 because the impact of it has been obvious. You’ve likely read articles on that already, listened to it, or personally have experienced it yourself. The only thing to say is to thank all of the essential workers who still are doing their jobs throughout this pandemic, and we’ll be keeping you in thoughts not just for now, but for even beyond this global crisis.

So since I missed a roundup of March, this is essentially a combination of articles from that month and April. I’ll also look to get back into having an interview as well next month, but instead, I’ll repost part of a transcript of an event at Kinokuniya back in 2017 involving a couple of Weekly Shonen Magazine editors (Kiichiro Sugawara, Editor in Chief; Tetsuya Fujikawa, Editor of Aho Girl, Tsuredure Children; Megumu Tsuchiya, Editor of Fire Force, The Heroic Legend of Arslan):

Weekly Shonen Magazine Editors talk Hiromu Arakawa, Fire Force, Doujinshi

Ok, so we are lucky to have the editors of three Kodansha shonen magazine series that we are publishing in English today. Tetsuya Fujikawa is editor of Aho-Girl, A Clueless GirlIt’s on Crunchyroll and it’s one of their top anime streams this season and I don’t think anyone expected it because, and I mean it as a compliment, it’s really dumb. *audience laughs* We all in the office are enjoying it, and as you can see on the cover, the character really loves bananas and is also…stupid. *audience laughs* So each cover is here having a simple trap set for her using bananas as bait.
This is a four-panel manga, which does not often get translated into English, so I’d like to start by asking Fujikawa-san what is it like creating a four-panel comedy manga in Japan and what was your process with the author like on that?

Tetsuya Fujikawa: So unlike other manga in Japan, yonkoma, or four-panel manga is very specific: it has four panels on one page and that alone shows you what the plot and the twist of the story were. The four-panel manga is very popular in Japan because even though it’s short and only one page it’s very worthwhile to read it because the content is varied. So the way that the manga is set up is different because it’s four-panel, however the way the manga comes to be and the meetings they have with authors is exactly the same for other manga.

But for Aho-Girl in particular the meetings are super simple. Hiroyuki always ask during these meetings, “Fujikawa-san, what do YOU want to read from me?” and I say I want to see Yoshiko (main female lead) cheer on Akkun (main male lead). And Hiroyuki’s like, “All right, got it,” and that’s it. *audience laughs*

Hiroyuki actually lives a very proper life, so the meetings with him are very succinct and as Sugiwara-san said before, there’s no rest for these authors but for Hiroyuki he definitely takes his rest *audience laughs*. So my theory is Hiroyuki is actually a ninja, and he’s super fast at making his deadlines and making his manuscripts. So for me I have no worries in the world and I’m not working hard! *audience laughs* Despite all that, I got to come to New York and that makes me super happy. Thank you! (This part was said in English by Fujikawa)

Ben: Could you discuss a little bit about the actual process he goes through in creating a chapter? *roughs of Aho-Girl is shown on the screen*

Hiroyuki works solely through digital programs. So these rough drafts and storyboard stages and even the final stages are all done digitally. Because of that the process for making the rough drafts and making the final ones are super detailed and that goes into the process as well.

So as I was saying before, because he’s a genius so there’s only one thing I have to say during the rough stage: It’s amazing! (says this in English) *audience laughs*

*Roughs to final draft are shown of Aho-Girl on the screen*

It is unusual for manga artists to work totally digitally isn’t that right? I know a lot of American comic artists work completely digitally, but the norm in Japan is to put pen to paper correct?

So this is something that is really particular to Hiroyuki’s style and the way he works. During his rough draft stage wants to make the piece as close to the final as possible so the editors can get an image of what’s going to come about it. Hiroyuki does this because thanks to that detail at the beginning that means the humor and the funny punchlines can be there first. So I think it can be said that for Hiroyuki, from the rough draft to the final version, there might not be that many changes.

Next we’re going to move on to Tsuchiya, the Editor of The Heroic Legend of Arslan and Fire Force. We’ll start with Arslan *shows some rough character designs and setting sketches on the screen* I imagine there was a lot of time spent on the setting and costumes and character designs — could you talk about that process and how long you and the creator spent on that, and how did it go?

Megumu Tsuchiya: Thank you for coming (says this in English). Starting with the character designs, for Arslan there was a lot of content from the original author Yoshiki Tanaka. He had a lot of research that was already done for things based on the setting of Persia at the time. That became the base of a lot of the manga that you see today from Arslan.

In addition to the research and designs from Tanaka, there’s Arakawa who really enjoys going around and looking at antiques and vintage things. So what she went around to see and picked up also became the base for these designs.

So I’m going to talk about the characters’ faces and the hair design. What you see on the screen now is what first came out when Arakawa read the original and put something down on paper. After doing these initial faces, Arakawa read it again and went into more detail, even with the side characters as well. And there are really a lot of poignant moments in the original. So you can also tell that some of the characters were changed throughout, like Daryun was changed from the first concept to now.

So you can see the biggest change is the character on the bottom left, Gieve. So for Gieve, what Arakawa wanted to do first was not just draw for getting a certain aesthetic and just the looks but really get the voice right so that the character was someone who could really talk to women. But after another re-reading of the original Arslan there was a realization that actually all of the girls are pretty amazing and hard to not just fall for so the looks are also gonna matter at this point.

So, Arakawa read the original work three times in that early concept stage. It sounds like a lot of time went into that. How long did you and Arakawa discuss the setting, and how many meetings did you have before the manga itself started taking shape?

Tsuchiya: Arakawa, no matter what she’s working on, she can’t start working on something unless they know the final chapter of this. So once there was a decision to serialize Arakawa’s story there were many meetings with the editor.

The core of the story is about a boy named Arslan who wants to surpass King Andragoras, his father, and it is incredibly difficult to defeat this King because he was so strong, and it was very hard to make a character that could actually defeat him, so it actually took about half a year to get to this point and make a character that could, and during that time is when Arakawa read the original three times.

That’s a really long time to be working in the conceptual stages for a manga. I think it’s also unusual for an author to know the ending of a story. You mention that she does this for all of her manga, not just Arslan?

Tsuchiya: Arakawa definitely always needs to know the ending before she starts doing the whole series, and so for Full Metal Alchemist, Silver Spoon, for FMA the ending turned out exactly what she intended from the beginning.

Ok, I’d like to move on to Atsushi Ohkubo’s Fire Force. You’ve been kind enough to bring over some of the roughs and final draft for it. This is another series that seems like a lot of work went into the setting since it’s supposed to be an alternate history Tokyo, that is a little bit steampunky and mechanical than modern Tokyo…what was the process of creating the characters and setting of this manga like?

Tsuchiya: So in Fire Force the setting and the world-building is certainly Tokyo but not exactly Tokyo so there is some steampunk elements to it. Ohkubo was inspired by the concept of “What would happen if WWII never happened and the Taisho era continued as a culture and wasn’t interrupted?”

Now for the characters, Ohkubo wrote a manga called Soul Eater, does anyone know what is–*audience acknowledges they do* For that manga Ohkubo drew and had all students in the cast so they have a sort of childlike quality to them. So the biggest key that started the characters in Fire Force was that they’re all professionals working in their careers so there is no point of child workers.

The main character name’s in Fire Force is Shinra, but Ohkubo likes to make up characters by a sort of word association, and that’s how he builds the characters. So for Shinra the first word bubble was Akuma, or demon/evil. So for Ohkubo the whole point is that someone who’s evil is completely opposite to heroes in society like firefighters, and that polar opposite leans itself to Shinra the character because he will have a scary face but then also a silly face. And I also heard that the main character in Soul Eater, Kid, is the child of the Death God. So for him that character had to be one who’s very complete and perfect and has no flaws.

*screen flips from rough draft to final draft*

It looks like these names are done with pencil and paper. Could you talk about Ohkubo’s process, does he switch to digital for the final version or is the whole thing on paper?

Tsuchiya: Both Ohkubo and Arakawa only work by hand and draw on paper, however Arakawa for color uses Copic markets on paper while Ohbuko on the flip side uses digital for colored pages.

So I can see a few differences on the layout of these pages (from rough to final draft). How much feedback do you give to Ohbuko on a chapter and what is that process like? Does he depend on you to get that feedback or does he tend to push back?

Tsuchiya: So from my meetings with Ohkubo as you can see during the rough draft stage, we meet a lot and talk about the story but since it’s so fun the story that comes to the editor there’s not much to change. The things the editor changes more or suggests is asking who’s really saying this line, where are the characters standing, just to make it clear for the readers.

So during these editorial meetings Ohbuko is usually like, “all right, I get it,” and will go with it. But when he’s feeling really moody it actually helps to have him play the smartphone game that he’s super into and once he plays that he kinda just goes along with it and is like, “Ok, it’s just fine.” *audience laughs*


Various Reports From Around The Web

1. At AniTAY: The Imaginarium of Satoshi Kon

From the quality of the animation, to his writing, to his awe-inspiring editing, Kon’s films have been remembered and revered for nearly a decade since his death by both anime fans, and more mainstream film savants. While his body of work can (and deserves to) be looked at for his various skills as an animator, I’m discussing his films here because he ended up being the master of the concept of imaginarium when it comes to showing it on film, since he regularly played with the idea of undefinable reality. A dreamscape that pushes and eventually bends reality to the point where it’s unrecognizable. A past that ends up reshaping the here and now. 

2. Over at Manga Therapy: The Manga World’s More Than Just Jump:

There are a few manga folks that feel readers have to be exposed more to other legal manga sources besides Jump. I have to agree with those people.

Just because it’s the prevalent option doesn’t mean it will satisfy everyone’s needs. Not everyone likes material from Shonen Jump or shonen in general. There’s other services that don’t get as much attention due to lack of promotional resources. I also realize that certain notable manga services are terrible (Crunchyroll Manga being one of them).

Why is it that people talk about the US edition Shonen Jump like that’s the best option to read cheap legal manga when it may not exactly be the case? I think I’ll discuss this by talking about how cognitive biases play a role.

3. Because Hunter x Hunter is awesome — Fighting With Impact: The Brilliance of Hunter x Hunter’s Nen System:

Nen’s mechanics extend beyond “it’s a type of life energy that can be used for energy attacks,” though. All nen users also fall into one of six categories, from enhancers, who are able to enhance the strength of their own bodies through nen power, to conjurers, who can summon objects out of nen entirely. These six categories are framed in a hexagonal grid formation, and the grid pattern actually matters—those who fall in a given nen category will have the least trouble producing abilities from their end of the grid, but great difficulty mastering abilities from the far end. And this system of power tradeoffs extends to individual abilities, as well—the greater the effect of a given nen ability, the more restrictions, preconditions, or consequences for its usage.

Through the nen system, Hunter x Hunter is able to provide a sense of balance and structure to its fights, letting the overall “power levels” of its characters rise up dramatically without ever losing a sense of strategic solidity and point-counterpoint back-and-forth in its fight scenes. The six categories of nen specialists act as natural indicators of “combat specialization,” but with the added significance of physically defining your combat limits. If an opponent appears who’s a terrific enhancer, we instinctively know the solution is likely not to take them face-on; and if the opponent is a manipulator, we know to watch for any traps that might put us under their sway.

4. At Tea Time, Ren provides a detailed review of the anime film Children of the Sea:

If asked what Children of the Sea is about, the single most condensed answer would be the mysticism of nature. As such when going through this story -whether in manga or anime form-, one should leave logic behind and let their senses take over. Daisuke Igarashi urges naturalism throughout most of his works and presents our (re)connection with nature both as healing and something to be reckoned. But above all as something fundamental to and inside of us. That’s both the experience and the message of Children of the Sea.

A girl who expresses herself physically and is rejected by the sports club at the beginning of the summer holidays; her parents who have failed their relationship; two boys whose mother was a dugong; the scientists who care about the boys and the company that’s interested in them; spotted sea species disappearing from aquariums worldwide and deep sea creatures getting stranded- all of them swirl around a festival of birth and the mundane coexists along the grandiose. And thus the mystery unfolds.

5. At Beneath the Tangles: Newman’s Nook: Somali and the Imperfect Dad:

The golem tries to care for Somali and eventually finds someone in town who can make medicine for her. While the golem watches over the sickly, sleeping child, Kokilia asks them how they’re holding up. The golem blames themself for Somali getting sick. They feel fully at fault as though they should have been monitoring everything Somali was doing.

Kokilia then turns to the golem and says, “Mr. Golem…there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. I make mistakes of my own from time to time. Sometimes I let my anger get the best of me. Sometimes I leave him [Kikila] bawling his eyes out, but whenever I mess up, I always take him in my arms and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I make sure he knows I care about him. It’s how both parent and child grow. It’s what the relationship is about.”

Despite being an emotionless, created thing, the golem takes some comfort in these words. So do I.

6. Erica Friedman talks to the creator of Yuri comic Mage & Demon Queen, Color_LES (Kuru):

CL: It was a high school classmate who introduced me to Yuri. We were casually talking about anime, and when I asked her if she knows what Yaoi is, she said, “Yuri is better!”

I had no idea what Yuri was, so she told me that I should look it up online.

…And so, I did. What turned up in the search results stunned me! Girls liking girls? That hits close to home. I was so perturbed by my discovery that I had dreamt of Yuri that night. When I woke up, I knew I was already hooked. LOL

My first Yuri was Kannazuki no Miko. I relied on what’s available in Youtube for my Yuri fix. Strawberry Panic was also there, but I preferred KnM for its action and fantasy elements. I grew up watching Shounen anime with my brothers, so it’s what had appealed to me.

At that time, I had never imagined that I’d end up drawing Yuri for a living. I’ve always aspired to be a manga artist, but I didn’t give much thought as to what genre I’d focus on. I just wanted to create something “cool” that’d be a huge hit, like Naruto and other Shonen Jump titles. When my fascination for Yuri grew however, I did want to draw Yuri— but I was held back by my fear of being outed as a lesbian.

In 2013, Black Ink Comics, a local publisher, wanted some manga-style romance. I saw this as the opportunity to be the first to publish a Boys’ Love manga in my country (it had less of a risk of me being outed than Girls’ Love), but when I asked if they accept same-sex romance stories, they said they weren’t ready for those. The year after that, Black Ink released their first BL comic, which was a shock, to say the least. While I was upset that the chance to publish BL had slipped past me, it also dawned on me that they’d probably accept GL stories as well. I was still scared of being outed, but I went through with it anyway and that’s how World Canvas, my first Yuri comic, came to be.

I came out a few months after my book did, and the support I’ve gotten is absolutely heartwarming. I’m able to create what I love now and looking back at what I did, I’m happy.

7. Over at Yattatachi: Hi, I’m Angy from AniPlayList:

What’s an interesting tidbit you would like to share concerning AniPlaylist?

I have tried to personally contact labels & artists! In early 2019, I tried to send messages personally to labels and artists to ask them if they could add some of their songs on Spotify. The task was really tiresome, finding ways to contact labels/artists was not easy, and all messages needed to be written in Japanese so I had to ask the help of a Japanese speaking friend.

I sent more than a hundred messages, and 90% of them were left unanswered. Sometimes I didn’t get an answer and songs were still added. Honestly, I can’t even be sure it was thanks to my message, but I wrote a post about it on Medium last year.

The remaining 10% were mainly negative answers telling me to ask some label I couldn’t contact or just that they couldn’t do anything about it.

Fun fact: I sent an e-mail to the composer of a movie to ask if the soundtrack would ever be available on Spotify. I would have never expected the response I received–they sent me a WeTransfer with the complete soundtrack of the movie!

I will probably try to send messages again in the near future. With the help of the website and some search statistics, it might be easier to convince labels to release their songs on music platforms!

8. Very quirky (and cool) story to know at OGUIE MANIAX: Mogusa-san Finds New Success on Twitter:

Amid these uncertain times, a strange success story involving one of my current favorite manga artists has emerged over the past few weeks. 

Ootake Toshimoto, author of Mogusa-san and Teasobi, has been drawing a comic series titled 1 Iine 1 Yen de Bangohan o Taberu Harapeko Joshi, or in English, Hungry Girl Eats Dinner Where 1 Like Equals 1 Yen. The premise: Minori Mogusa, the perpetually hungry heroine of Mogusa-san, is in a situation where she gets 1 yen for every Twitter like. Then, she’s supposed to use the amount earned in each comic on her next dinner. In the first strip above, she has 0 yen, so she’s “air-eating.” 

But while the expectation was that she’d get maybe a few hundred likes, and could build a meal based off of that, reality panned out very differently.

The first comic received 70,155 likes.

9. Over at Full Frontal: Translation – New Anime Century – Year 5 of OVA Animage 1988/11:

The very first OVA to come out was DALLOS II published in December 1983, and we could say that the direction OVA would take was almost decided within the first two years, until November 1985. DALLOS got a start on video series by appointing popular staff (Director Mamoru Oshii, who was at his popularity peak with Urusei Yatsura, as well as Studio Pierrot). BIRTH, in 1984, proved the efficiency of promoting the work using events involving staff and voice actors. The pillars of the OVA industry – manga adaptations and anime spinoffs – were in place, and works such as Genmu Senki Reda, Tatakae!! Ikser I, as well as Megazone 23, were already out, so the Bishoujo mecha approach original to OVA was also established. Even if it did not become a major approach, experimental music videos like Machikado no Meruhen had also been done in 1984.

Until that point, for an OVA, we were talking about a budget of 10 million yen per 10 minutes, which meant 60 million for a 60 minutes work. This was a far higher production value than TV anime, and the situation made the creation of productions with high degrees of accomplishment easier. Unlike TV or feature films, projects emerging from the staff’s side were also more likely to realize, which was also appealing.

As such, the OVA industry was expected to flourish, but instead, it quickly started to stagnate from 1986. The number of works produced grew steadily, from about 50 in 1986 to 72 in 1987 and 90 in 1988. But without a significant growth of the demand, that excess of supply inevitably caused a drop in sales. Without sales, budgets got cut, and original projects were less likely to get approved. The staff for whom most of the work revolved around a handful of popular OVAs were also overworked.

10. At Funimation, Tom Speelman interviewed known Osamu Tezuka scholar Frederik L. Schodt:

Tezuka also established with Mushi Production the standard for anime production that still exists today; that is, bottom-tier animators working 50+ hour weeks for subpar wages and with no labor protections of any kind. Do you know if Tezuka ever regretted this? Do you see this labor practice changing for the better as production moves overseas?

Schodt: This is one of Miyazaki’s criticisms of Tezuka, in his autobiographies, Starting Point and Turning Point (which I translated with Beth Cary and which were published by VIZ Media). I am sure Tezuka would have loved to pay his animators more. But it is important to remember that Mushi Production went bankrupt, and it caused Tezuka (and the people who worked for him) enormous grief.

Without this cut-rate production style, however, Japanese animation would probably never have assumed the stature that it does today. I think that working conditions for animators in Japan are still awful, and I don’t see them improving because productions are moving overseas. It’s not just an issue of long hours and low pay. Even the ergonomics and spatial constraints are appalling. I don’t know how young people can physically stand it.

11. A very enjoyable convention story at let’s anime: No Elvis, Beatles, or Clove Cigarettes In 1997 Addison: My A-Kon 8 Story:

1. Beer Me 

So you want to know about A-Kon 8? Let me tell you about A-Kon 8. First off we were an hour late even getting started on our 12-hour road trip. Every year the number willing to make this hellish journey shrinks. We’re down to two cars. Pretty soon it’ll be one guy on a motorcycle and the rest of us will get brains and fly. Anyway, 12 hours, bad food, lots of pee breaks, and four state lines later, we arrived in Dallas, checked in, met pals Ed, Neil, Anna, Max, etc., and proceeded to split for buffalo fajitas at a nearby upscale Mexican restaurant. Had the first beer of the con, a Corona. More to follow. The hotel is jammed with people checking in, looking lost, asking where the heck other people are. 

Friday morning we get up late, trundle some crap downstairs to set up our fan table, split with Ed to buy liquor and food and get his cooler from his house in Euless (a solid 20 miles away), pet his pets, and return. The dealers room is kinda average and most of the dealers are pissed off because A-Kon decided not to allow SM CDs, which are some sort of Taiwanese-Korean-HK-Malay knockoff pirate brand that come ten bucks cheaper than the genuine article. Most of the day’s liquor run consists of Lone Star, Corona, and some Molson as a nod to our Canadian guests, who don’t drink anyway. Lone Star is one of those beers that respectable beer drinkers (meaning, “snobs”) turn their noses up at. Well, screw ‘em, that means more for me. Plus, shove a lime wedge down the longneck and it ain’t half bad. The prize of the day is Sailor Moon party plates and napkins found at the local Wal-Mart. This gives you an idea of what kind of con this was – I remember more about the liquor stores and the Wal-Mart than I do about the con itself. The fan table work was slow… not many people are interested in fanzines and comics when they can buy lesbian furry zines and anime character cheesecake pin-ups. I know sex sells, but here it seems sex is all that sells. 

12-16: This is a combination of interviews Anime News Network has conducted over the past two months, in no particular order except one:

Kim Morrissy’s interview with Stars Align Director Kazuki Akane, which is two parts. Here’s an excerpt from Part 1:

It was around five years ago. Homosexuality is a fairly common theme among Japanese manga and novels, particularly in Boys-Love works that are aimed at women. I knew that there was a genre for same-sex relationships, but as far as entertainment in general goes, I had my reservations about how it’s often portrayed. You see, in live-action television, love between men is treated as comedy. It’s a similar case overseas as well, like in America or Europe, and I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about it. I always thought there was something wrong about it.

In Stars Align, there’s a plot where the boys dress as girls so that they can gather intel on a rival school. When I was writing it, I heard that people who question their sexuality and gender exist. So I actually gathered information about it. Someone I know introduced me to a person who presents as male, but the family registry says he’s a woman. Through talking with him, I understood that this kind of plot shouldn’t be mere comedy. When he told me that he’d been questioning his gender ever since he was a child, it made me think about the struggle we all have to reconcile our identities and where we belong in the world.

The scene in the anime is not just about same-sex relationships but about finding our place in the world. It’s about all kinds of things. Gender identity is a part of that as well. Finding that purpose in your own being is something that everyone who participates in society has to do in some form or another. I wanted to make use of that in my story, or rather have it as one of the themes.

You don’t really see much of this kind of thing in anime, do you? I mentioned before that it’s presented as comedy, and I think that’s awfully insensitive. Questioning your gender is a perfectly valid thing to do. I think that anyone who has ever questioned their place or reason for being should be able to empathize in some way.

Japanese people have an old-fashioned way of thinking when it comes to these things, so there’s not yet a widespread understanding of LGBTQ+ and X-gender. There are Japanese words like “okama” and “onee”. I think we really ought to change the way we talk about such people. Young people should be able to understand, so I wanted to try putting this message into an anime. Even in Japan, young people have a better reaction regarding LGBTQ+ than older people do. Older people tend to panic. (laughs)

But, you know, I was really surprised by the amount of reaction the episode got from overseas on Twitter and so on. When episode 8 came out, there was a flood of reactions from people happy about the message about LGBTQ+ and empathizing with others.

Here’s an interview with the staff behind BEASTARS — specifically, the ones who created the OP animation:

The dancing scene is particularly impressive. What reference material did you use to make this scene perfect?

I watched tons of videos of professional dancers. However, none of them quite fitted what I was going for. The dance I wanted Haru and Legoshi to do was not the consummate work of a professional. When I watched a video of two people doing their first dance at a western wedding ceremony, it suddenly clicked. It needed something more amateurish and above all, it needed “love.” I added in the basic steps of a jive to the dance.

Here’s an interview with an anime that aired this Spring Season: Interview: APPARE-RANMAN! Director Masakazu Hashimoto:

The biggest thing about P.A.WORKS is that it has a relatively large in-house staff. A lot of anime studios in Japan make use of freelancers, but P.A.WORKS’s Toyama studio has a large number of in-house animators. It’s nice to have that consistency; it makes production feel relatively stable. It’s also nice that the staff is so tight-knit because it makes it easy to relay instructions to everyone.

Toyama Prefecture is quite far away, so we connect online and hold video conferences in real time. My work is in Tokyo, so when I do the checks, the people in Toyama have to show me everything they’re doing through a screen and we talk about it. I never had problems with communication, and the distance between Toyama and Tokyo never felt significant.

So was there anything that you felt was challenging when creating APPARE-RANMAN!?

The hardest part was compiling the ideas and deciding on the plan to go through with at the start. Every time I went back to the drawing board, there was a lot of work to do. But once we worked out how we were going to proceed to a certain degree, things were relatively smooth. There are always difficulties that come up in the middle of production, but on the other hand, I had even more fun making this anime because I was making something I really wanted to make.

And here’s an interview with The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (among other works) creator Tomihiko Morimi:

Taiyō no Tō depicts the everyday Kyoto of a student living in Sakyo Ward.

It’s not the so-called “Kyoto-esque Kyoto,” or the sort of Kyoto you see in the travel mysteries you might find in Kayō suspense gekijō [Tuesday suspense theater, a two-hour drama format that used to run on NTV]. I knew I couldn’t write that kind of Kyoto, but I felt like if it was this sort of shabby Kyoto from the perspective of a university student’s daily life, then maybe I could.

I feel like there weren’t really novels before yours depicting the type of student you’d find in Kyoto. It was so fresh.

To me, I wasn’t writing Kyoto so much as I was writing the things I fantasized about in the context of my daily life. And since Taiyō no Tō, I’ve continued to write with that base of Kyoto through the eyes of a student, adding new elements as I go.

It actually wasn’t until after that first book came out that I realized Kyoto was such a great setting for my novels. More people read Yojōhan Shinwa Taikei (The Tatami Galaxy, 2004) and The Night is Short Walk On, Girl (2006; [English 2019]) than I could have imagined. It shocked me, like, “There’s really this much demand?!” It was like I’d struck oil with the combination of Kyoto, students, and mysterious fantasy.