Tokyo Love

So an exciting update!

This July, I will be having a new romance novel coming out, Tokyo Love. Published by Crimson Romance.

Please witness the beautiful cover…

I'm super excited! I've always wanted to write a novel that takes place in Japan. What better way to express it than to write a romance based around the tropes of all my favorite shōjo manga tropes? I've got café dates, shrine visits, getting drunk at a nomikai, hanabi, hanami, Nikko, New Years, and I've even got a love robot.

Why yes, I am a weeb.

So I've decided to write a small blog series of some of my experiences in Japan that helped inspire the novel.

Some background on why I've been to Japan multiple times: my sister lives there. She has been living there for about 8 years now, studying traditional music in Tokyo. Taking a trip to Japan isn't very cheap, but it really cuts on cost when you can sleep on your sister's floor for free haha.

I guess the first story I'll share is probably my favorite experience of Japan. It also happened the first time I visited (at age 19) and it also has zero relevance to my novel. Besides the whole… being in Japan thing…

So, just in case it wasn't clear, I watch a lot of anime. My taste really ranges from actually well-done, meaningful anime, to pure trash anime. No, seriously, I can enjoy Baccano and Junjō Romantica in the same sitting. I have no class.

Well, one of my favorite anime is Hikaru no Go. Which may look like a typical gaming/sports anime from the outside, but trust me it is beautiful and makes me weep. Anyway, it involves something of a road trip from Tokyo to this super tiny island outside of Hiroshima called Innoshima (not to be mistaken with Enoshima). What is on Innoshima? A tiny Go museum with a graveyard that has the grave of Honinbō Shūsaku.

For the uninitiated, Go is a Japanese game similar to chess. Here's the picture from the Wikipedia page. 

Honinbō Shūsaku is a famous Japanese Go player from the 19^th century and was born in Innoshima.

If you watch Hikaru no Go, you'll understand why this is super nerdy and not just super lame of me to want to go to this landmark.

Anyway, back to reality… Innoshima isn't exactly the easiest place to get to from Tokyo. It's about 4 hours on shinkansen to Hiroshima. Then you have to take local trains to Onomichi Station, and then a bus to the actual island. Well, we made it on to Innoshima, but from where the bus dropped us off, it was still a ways to the museum and gravesite. So we opted to try to catch another local bus.

We waited for probably over thirty minutes. We were beginning to lose hope that a bus would ever come. (Japanese public transportation can be pretty flawless, but we were rather in the boonies of Japan at this point). We began to notice this van of Japanese boys was cruising around town and had totally passed us a couple times. We began to joke that they were stunned by the sight of foreigners on their tiny island and would probably try to pick us up the next time they passed.

And they did! My sister was able to talk to them in Japanese and asked them to take us to the Go museum. They were super eager and friendly and really bad at driving. To this day, I am convinced that they had never talked to a foreigner in their lives. They could barely find the Go museum (even though it was a tiny island) and my sister managed to convince them that we didn't want to go out for drinks later.

At the museum, which is only a couple rooms large, we were greeted by the director of the museum (who had possibly never gotten foreigners at his museum before) and who gave us a personal tour of everything in the museum. When he found out that I knew very little Japanese, he attempted to explain everything in simple Japanese words and phrases. Which mostly helped my sister, I still was lost (I mean, the Japanese I knew was dumb phrases I had heard in anime. So totally useless). So then he also started acting everything out. This grown man hopped around like a rabbit and crawled into a closet for the sake of my understanding. It was beautiful.

Then a friend of his came to the museum to play a game of Go and he let us watch. Admitting later that he was super nervous. Which, honestly, my sister and I barely understand the fundamentals of Go. We could hardly judge his strategy.

We went off to find the grave of Honinbō Shūsaku. It was the first time I've ever been in a Japanese graveyard (more like gravecity!) and it was up on the hill, giving us a great view of the small town.

For reference, here is a picture of the grave that my sister took

And the view!

When we returned to the museum, the director gave us a lift back to the bus station. There, we met a stranger who complimented my skin, saying it was very pale. But I think I could write a whole ten blogs about the differences in Japanese vs Western aesthetics and why I received many compliments on my white skin.

Over all, Trip to Innoshima? 10/10 would travel there again.

Look forward to see none of this anecdote in the novel! Haha!