Previously on “Why Write a Science Fiction Book in Japan”….
Part I (click here for full post): I write my first science fiction story in 4th grade and continue writing until high school, where I receive the creative writing award for a story about sea people. I then go on to meet N, who becomes my good friend. We watch movies together, read books, do creative things, and hang out with college students. But I disagree with him on one key element of creativity, and that key element is…….
Part II (click here for full post): ……well, we’ll get to that a bit later. I’m still young at this point and haven’t figured myself and other people out yet.
I do, however, go on to college and discover that I’m not allowed to have my own opinions or ideas that aren’t somehow piggy-backing off of other scholars, writers, filmmakers, artists, or some sort of renowned predecessor. The teachers certainly don’t encourage original thought, and the other students don’t buy it. I learn that it’s best to just copy other works from people with more clout and sprinkle in a bit of me every now and then like everyone else.
Later, I get my first job out of college working vampire hours at a TV station in central Illinois. I really want to make indy films to show at arthouse theaters, but it looks like I’m going to have to forget about that indefinitely and focus more on rising up the ranks to general manager of my TV station.
Then, a year later, my friend C proposes a rando idea that will go on to help me rediscover that spark that so many years of copying other people had crushed out of me.
“Let’s move to Japan and teach English!”
Part III (click here for full post): Well, I go to Japan and teach English, anyway. C doesn’t even make it through the initial application procedure before throwing in the towel.
I spend 3 years in a northern prefecture in Japan called Iwate. There, I meet some of the smartest and most interesting people I’ve met in my life. They’re all expats from English-speaking countries, and we’re all on the same English-teaching program, the JET Program.
After I finish with the JET Program, I move to a suburb of Tokyo called Yokohama, where I spend the majority of my time alone with my mind wandering. That’s how I enter the headspace I so often found myself in from elementary to high school: the writer’s headspace. Where I would think of all sorts of crazy ideas and make up stories about them.
That’s when I write my first story in 5 years. It’s called “Lonely Momoka,” and it’s about a lonely Japanese girl in Tokyo. A friend of mine from the JET Program reads it, loves it, and I regain my confidence. I don’t worry so much anymore about these so called rules my teachers and peers were so adamant about in school. I can write whatever I want, because being myself is what I do best.
But why science fiction though?!
I’m in Japan! I should be writing about ninja, samurai, Yu-gi-oh characters with Pokemon faces!
Well, that’s part of my jam. I don’t have to write anything in any particular way. I could go live in Poland and write about ninja. I could live in Russia and write about African tribes on the moon! I could skyrocket to Neptune and write about ants in an ant colony underground in Estonia!
I can do ANYTHING!
And, most importantly, I’m not around people who want me to adhere to certain rules and follow set patterns. If I were in America, I’d still be miserable at that TV station trying to work my way up to general manager JUST BECAUSE I had studied TV production in school, and for me to not pursue a career in that, I would have WASTED ALL OF THAT TUITION MONEY STUDYING IT!
If I were still in America, I’d still be surrounded by other writers telling me I’ll never be published because I don’t sound like Flannery O’Connor—or whoever else their college professors told them to like.
I’d still be surrounded by other filmmakers wanting to make the next Star Wars, and I don’t even like Star Wars!
Wait, Ryan, you’re a film buff, and you don’t like Star Wars?!?!?
I used to get that a lot.
My reasoning even goes so far as politics! If I hung around the writers and filmmakers, they’d all hate Donald Trump, which means that I’d have to hate him too. But hating him wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to hate him in the same way they hated him for the exact same reasons. And I’m pretty sure most of the writers and filmmakers would be annoying SJWs too, and I’d have to agree with everything they said down to the exact word order or I’d be labeled as a racist, sexist, trans-phobic, or whatever pejorative term was trending in the media that week.
But in Japan I can escape it all! I can think, believe, and write whatever I want without people around me telling me I’m wrong and should think or do things a certain way.
I can see the world from an objective point of view from Japan—because of the language barrier—and I don’t have people trying to sell me on their agenda and clobber me over the head with their beliefs down to the damn font size!
Hell, I even think that the average person is a bigger science fiction fan than I am!
All I wanted to do was read more Kurt Vonnegut—who didn’t even consider himself a science fiction writer. I wanted to read more of the stories from Kilgore Trout (the recurring science fiction writer character in his novels). But Kurt Vonnegut was dead in 2015, and had been since 2007. I wasn’t going to be getting any Kilgore Trout stories from any Kurt Vonneguts ever again.
So I could make my own up!
So that’s what I did that one lonely afternoon in the busy and cold city of Tokyo in Japan 3 years ago: I wrote a science fiction story a la Kurt Vonnegut as Kilgore Trout. It was a story about a fat dork that traveled to the planet Tylgum where the people who ate too much shrank, and the people who didn’t eat enough grew into giants….
A bit anti-climactic, this ending, so I’ll go back and say it a different way to make it at least sound better.
I wrote a science fiction book in Japan because no one was around telling me that I really shouldn’t.
Alright, that’s all! I’ll write different posts about different things now!
Planet Lazy 