Jacob Ritari is the author of the novel, Taroko Gorge. The novel, his first, has recieved much praise from critics and I myself recommend it highly.
Here is an interview I recently had with Jacob.
Where did you get the idea for Taroko Gorge? More specifically, why Japanese school girls, 2 Americans, and a bunch of Taiwanese cops? Obviously experience ties into it, but are there any underlying reasons?
I think that just as the characters encounter each other at the gorge by a chance, a number of seemingly unrelated things came together for me in this book. There are a lot of ways I could answer the question, and since I want to answer so many other of these questions at length, I’ll go with the most literal:
The encounter between Neils, Pickett and the two Taiwanese schoolgirls at the monastery in chapter one was something that actually happened to me and a friend when we studied there. The conversation they have after is, verbatim, ours; with Neils as me and Pickett as my friend. The uneasiness of that weird exchange—“I don’t have any interest in fifteen-year-old girls,” “Well neither do I”—really stuck with me. Other parts of the book are based on my experience, but that was the seed.
Where did the ideas for the characters of Neil and Pickett come from?
I had the outline of the story before I knew all the characters involved. A journalist seemed obvious as a narrator; Neils’ job is to report things objectively and that becomes a problem. He’s also educated and smart enough to make some of the observations I wanted made. Pickett though I can answer for more readily: he’s That Guy you meet in Asia. He’s basically decent, but he came there looking for a good time, unprepared for “the horror” of losing touch with the culturally familiar. You can see that Neils is much better prepared, and he’s sort of challenged to be a father figure to Pickett; but whether he rises to that challenge I’ll leave to the reader to find out.
How about the various Japanese kids and the teacher?
The dynamics of Japanese high school have always fascinated me, largely because it’s the focus of so many anime/manga series. I think the drama is heightened vis-à-vis American schools because there are still these holdover ideas about class unity and school actually shaping your character. And you have everyone wearing uniforms so there’s that element of pageantry. The dynamic is very charming when it works properly, but like many things in Japan, when it goes wrong it goes horribly wrong. One review described Michiko as a “disgruntled Japanese schoolgirl” which I think is perfect for her: “Japanese High School and Its Discontents.”
The idea of a Class Rep especially I’ve always liked and Tohru in the novel takes that role very seriously; he very much feels responsible for everyone. Sumiregawa feels outside the group on account of his intellect and says at one point: “I’d much rather be well-read than a member of society.” Michiko is thoroughly ordinary, but nurses this monstrous secret envy.
Battle Royale of course is about turning that paradigm of class unity on its head and exposing the vicious underbelly; obviously there’s a touch of BR in the scene where the kids are bickering in the cafeteria.
The ending for Taroko Gorge (for Neil at least) was kind of sudden. Is there a possibility of bringing his character back in a sequel type novel?
Actually, I’m not surprised to hear it. Neils’ ending is the result of a lot of infighting between me, my agent and my editor. My original ending had him getting a reconciliatory letter from his wife, which I meant to further unnerve him as being a good thing happening for no apparent reason, not as a reward for anything; but my agent took it in the opposite spirit and thought it was sappy. Then I gave him some little monologue reflecting on the events. My editor hated that and suggested his own version, which I hated, and finally I just said—here; let’s cut it here. Neils has been brought to the point where he has nothing left to say.
And I find it unlikely he would come back. The characters of Taroko Gorge I think are trapped there, repeating their stories over and over; they’ve failed to learn anything. I would say more but I’m afraid of giving anything away…
From experience and from reading about other authors’ experience, multi-character novels are probably some of the most difficult types of novels to write. Did you have any issues with that aspect? For example, continuity issues or the like?
I would say it suggested itself as the only way the story could be told, and came to me relatively easily. I think one of my strengths is as a mimic—I learned to write by parroting other writer’s styles—and I don’t think I have a single, third-person voice that’s recognizably me.
Have you got any ideas for any other novels you’d like to write?
I’ve written a fair amount and actually, I’m juggling several candidates for my next book. Since I don’t know which one it will be, I can’t say very much, but readers can certainly look forward to a lot more about Japan.
You have studied in Taiwan and Japan, and are currently in Japan. What are some of your favorite parts of the countries?
My stay in Taiwan was brief, and really Japan has been my interest all along; most of what I saw in Taiwan was the inside of that monastery. I think Taiwan in general is a very nice place, and some Neils’ slightly patronizing observations are my own. To live in Japan I think takes a certain masochistic streak. Actually the friend I mentioned earlier, who helped inspire the book, went to Japan afterward to teach for JET; I visited him in the middle of nowhere and he was just stoically plugging away. I admired that. Now he’s back in Taiwan and I see all these pictures of him all smiling, in the sunshine, swimming in rivers, drinking cocktails—and I’m like come back here you traitor, come back and suffer!
But to get back on topic, my favorite area of Japan is Kansai—Osaka, Nara, Kyouto. Not only does it have the most awesome stuff in terms of sights, museums, cuisine&etc.; but I like the people. Tokyo to me is a very weird city; like New York, people are just ground down by the stress. I went to Shinjuku the other day and felt like the father from Ozu’s Tokyo Story, just in from the provinces. Kyouto took some time to grow on me but if you can get past all the other foreigners, and how modern of a place it really is, it’s incredible.
To me, you mentioned you just got back from Akihabara and in the book, it’s obvious that you know alot about the popular culture in Japan (Azumanga Daioh references, Battle Royale being mentioned, etc etc). Are you following any current anime airing in Japan?
Well, it used to be a big part of my life. It’s hard to express how much certain series meant to me in high school and college; how the liveliness of everything, the brilliance of the colors, the spot-on timing of the conversations inspired me when the real world seemed unutterable dreary. When I studied abroad and was here for the first time, Akihabara was on the train between my college and my homestay and I was there pretty much every day.
But now I feel so oldschool. I think a lot of people in America don’t understand what a huge movement this is, how quickly it grows and evolves. When I got to Akihabara, Haruhi and Lucky Star were the big things and I was right there with it. Now it’s this K-On business about some girls in a band. I like it just fine, but it baffles me why it’s so popular. In just a few years I fell completely out of touch.
I don’t really consider myself an otaku anymore, but there are some series I still follow. The ones that engage me the most deal with the problem of everyday life—nichijyou seikatsu. Japanese people will tell you “Japan isn’t anything like what you see in anime,” which is a complete lie…for example my homestay was in Saitama, very close to where Lucky Star is set (and I visited the shrine that appears in the opening sequence). Saitama is fucking boring. There is literally nothing to do there but discuss which end of a chocolate coronet is the “head.” But in Haruhi, you have this girl quixotically trying to overcome the boredom of life; whereas in Lucky Star life, viewed properly, is already interesting. Azumanga is a quintessential series in that line, and there’s one that hasn’t been translated yet called Sketchbook that I like.
I’ve gotten very into Detective Conan recently, which I don’t know I’d even call anime in the usual sense. It’s just family entertainment; sort of like The Simpsons with a murder every week. It didn’t fare very well in translation and I imagine that’s why.
I should mention three others: Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, the manga of which is just starting to come out in the States; and you can find the anime on Youtube. That stuff is goddamn sensational. It’s one of the most subversive things I’ve ever seen. I also think the 2006 anime version of Kanon is especially beautiful; and although I can’t pretend it has any deep meaning, I still follow Ken Akamatsu’s Negima. It has this always-do-your-best message and I feel like at difficult points in my life, a new volume comes out and I’m reminded that if a ten-year-old kid can be the greatest wizard ever, I can sure as hell pay my rent. In the most recent volume Negi is sparring with his teacher, and he gets knocked down and the guy goes, “hey it’s alright kid, you did your best,” and he makes these little kissy-lips. And Negi gets pissed and comes back swinging. It’s hysterical.
Taroko Gorge contains a lot of religious and spiritual themes. Are you yourself religious/spiritual?
I’m actually a very ordinary, thoroughly convinced Christian, which I think is hardly obvious from the book. I converted in high school which was sort of dramatic I guess but now I take it from granted. I’m certainly not someone though who thinks religion is totally provable by reason and thus anyone who doesn’t believe just isn’t thinking carefully. Taroko Gorge is very much about the intellectual tension and feeling God’s absence. But I’m also gravitating away from this idea of faith as an intensely personal, subjective thing. I think that as a culture we need new ways of understanding God, and in Taroko Gorge it’s the traditional ways (or rather, the current ways—the really traditional was in many ways more profound) that fail.
Near the end of the book, Tom (who actually speaks the most for me) has a little bit on William of Ockham. To me that’s the key passage in the book. It was Ockham perhaps more than anyone else who invented this idea of God as a being distinct from creation, like you or me except much more powerful, which eventually led to the absurd “white man with a beard in the clouds.” When you consider God in that way it’s laughable to make a case for his “existence;” it’s because of Ockham that we can ask if God could microwave a burrito so hot He couldn’t eat it. But I think Christianity has drifted far from its roots in America and that’s something I want to explore further in future books.
There is a lot I want to ask, but it’s all just jumbled up and I can’t decide what to ask so: Is there any interesting info/useless trivia, etc that you feel like throwing out there?
Well…I could have discussed this earlier, but—living in Japan has an elegiac tone these days. Just twenty years ago, America and Japan were rivals and everyone was scrambling to figure out why the Japanese were so “weird.” Now I think we understand that China is going to run roughshod over us both. There are far fewer jobs for Japanese speakers in the States and English speakers in Japan. But that suits me fine. Artists are useless, art is useless, but the useless has a value of its own; I feel right at home here with the relics of the past. I aspire to be nothing more than one of those old men playing shogi in the park.
How about words of advice to those looking to write and publish?
Hmm. Well, most of the conventional advice about writing a good query letter&etc. doesn’t feel very encouraging when you’re confronted with the arbitrariness, the philistinism, the sheer insanity of how the publishing industry works. It’s very difficult, if not borderline impossible, to get a novel published today, and if it is it will be chewed up by your agent, your editor, and your copy editor before it lands on the desk of the jackass at Publisher’s Weekly who’ll scratch his thick chimpanzee cranium before giving it a weird, passive-aggressive review. But I will say this: writing is its own reward. The only sort of human joy or success a writer can look forward to comes from writing itself.
You can find more information about Jacob and his book here on his website
