Sugaru Miaki's "The Town of Sakura" Hon no Hikidashi Interview
An interview with Sugaru Miaki (Fafoo) about his new novel, The Town of Sakura.
Contains spoilers for elements of the premise behind The Town of Sakura, some of which aren't introduced until several chapters in.
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Sugaru Miaki "The Town of Sakura" Interview: A Writer's Number One Job is to Find "Something Worth Writing"
Since debuting as a novelist in 2013 with Starting Over, Sugaru Miaki has earned a deeply-rooted popularity, especially with younger generations. Particular achievements include his second book Three Days of Happiness surpassing 60 printings and 300,000 copies sold, Parasite in Love being made into a live-action movie in 2021, and Your Story being nominated in 2018 for the 40th Eiji Yoshikawa Literary Prize for New Authors.
Using detailed writing to portray relationships and inner discord, Miaki's unique worlds that incorporate sci-fi-like elements have captivated readers. After 6 years, he's now released The Town of Sakura, a youthful mystery that includes plenty of these trademarks.
We interviewed Miaki-san to ask how the book came to be, and what kinds of things he values when writing a novel.
- The Characters Are Like Offshoots of Myself
— First, let me ask what prompted the creation of this book. A key element of the story is "Sakura," also referred to "prompters," people who get close to "individuals at high risk of suicide" to prevent their suicide. How did that element of the setting come to be?
After writing my previous book Your Story, there was a long period where whatever I tried to write, I would just throw it out partway. Plots that in the past I may have had no problems bringing to the end just felt like "If I wrote this, it would only end up as a rehash of a previous story."
During that time, while driving around for a change of pace, I saw a sign that read "Tokorozawa Sakura Town." Seeing those words, my impulse was to imagine "a town where all the residents are sakura [fakes]." Everyone's showing goodwill toward you, but they're little more than the equivalent of catfishers on matchmaking apps. When I combined the idea of a lonely world painted with lies and the words "Town of Sakura," I felt a conviction somewhere in my mind that this was something I would be able to write to the end.
The idea behind prompters was born from imagining what existing suicide-prevention systems could turn into if they underwent an irregular development. There actually already exist a few systems that try to detect indications of suicide from text posted to social media and report it, so if in the not-too-distant future, there were a system that could be incorporated in a particularly awful way into a society with advanced surveillance, I imagined it might be something like this.
By its nature, suicide prevention faces a dilemma where no amount of cleverness will prevent it from feeling somehow warped, unnatural, or inconsistent, so I feel that exaggerating that irregularity made for an effective way to depict human suspicion.
— When writing the book, how did you design the protagonist Ogami, the heroine Sumika, her sister Kasumi, and Kujirai, who holds the keys to the story? Was there anything in particular that led to the formation of their characters?
There aren't people who any of the characters were especially modeled after; instead, they're like offshoots of myself in a sense. It's a common criticism that I "don't depict other people," but I believe a single person can't depict anyone other than themselves in the first place.
I'm able to find the overlapping parts between myself and another, and draw from there. But to depict a person with a fundamentally different way of thinking from my own is, to be blunt, as much of a farce as telling me to write imagining how a cat feels. Even if there were certain things I could depict, they would only be the parts that overlap with human thought processes to some extent. Meanwhile, a single person has many different facets, and there are at least some elements among those I can confront head-on.
Taking those confrontations and having the characters interact based on those pretexts - I feel that holds far more meaning than interactions between "how a cat feels" and myself.
— I feel that your works always take great care to depict "towns" as a setting. In this book, the snowy setting is particularly striking; is there any connection to the scenery you grew up in, being born in Iwate?
The climate in the place I was born was, by the standards of people in east Japan, like winter for half the year, so I naturally end up writing something close to that when I aim to write a space that really lands for me. Cold, dim, a clear smell in the air, your breath turning white, snow sticking to your soles. Those used to be everyday sensations to me, but since moving to eastern Japan, I've become estranged from them.
At the time, I was just hoping for spring to come if only a second sooner - and yet now, when I try to produce comfortable scenery from my memories, all that keeps coming to mind is winter landscapes from my hometown.
- Beauty That Lets You Think "It's Not So Bad to Live As a Human"
— This book features frequent sci-fi elements like "the System" and "Handcuffs." I'd like to hear about your aims in including elements like that.
When you're indicating that the world is very similar to the world we live in, yet there's some small thing that's decisively different, I think it's easier for readers to intuitively understand it as "a different world" if you don't just explain the difference in words, but present it tangibly in a way they can feel. In this book, the adequately-sized foreign object that indicates that "small something" would be the Handcuffs.
— I wonder if there might be readers who sense a hard-boiled atmosphere from this book, like something from a foreign novel. Were you conscious of anything like that with your literary style?
I didn't consciously try to do anything with the style, but I feel like the most effective writing in my novels is the kind I choose subconsciously. I like sentimental stories, but using sentimental language to depict those feelings has the opposite effect. A comparison everyone can understand is that jokes should be said with as much of a straight face as possible, since the joke-teller laughing lessens the effect; it's the same when it comes to emotions. Emotional things should be said as curtly as possible.
— You've written many works dealing with death. Tell us what position death holds in your stories.
This isn't necessarily something limited to my own works, but stories are worlds brimming with death, moreso than reality. You can basically count on at least one person dying, on average. Because death in real life is a matter that there's absolutely no returning from, as well as an important phenomenon for how it highlights life by contrast, this is most likely owed to people wishing to consume it in the form of stories.
— I feel there are some common keywords in your stories, such as "fiction" and "lies," as well as "truth" and "reality." As a novelist, tell us what fiction, and novels, mean to you.
Perhaps I'd say that to me, stories are "lies" which, despite not being reality, cause no harm if you assume they're reality, and can make it easier to live if you assume they're reality. Even if I tell lies in a story about the way a situation is, I don't intend to tell lies about the way humans are. At the very least when it comes to people, I ensure that the only things that happen are "things that wouldn't be strange to have happened."
To explain in terms of this book, the System that produces Sakura may be a lie, but as far as people's reactions to Sakura, I aimed to stay as close to the real deal as possible. In a story like that, if any kind of beautiful thing arises, it means you can apply that beauty to real humans as well. And as a result, you can think "huh, it's not so bad to live as a human."
- The Ideal Distance Between Author and Reader
— You commented on Twitter that you "wrote what you'd want to read," so what part of this book most feels like "what you wanted to read"?
Rather than there being a particular scene I wanted to depict, I said that to mean that I aimed to make each and every sentence a comfortable one for me. Even for a nothing sentence that just connects scenes together, I made an effort to make it something that made you want to linger there longer, that would serve some function even if you made an excerpt of just that part.
— You've spent a long time writing this book compared to past works, but about how long did it actually take? Also, I'd like to hear if there were any particular troubles in completing it, or memorable anecdotes from writing.
While there was a blank period of about 6 years since my last book, I believe the time I actually spent on this book amounted to 2 years at most.
I don't recall struggling with anything in particular once I had the idea of "a town of fakers." Ultimately, I think a writer's number one job isn't writing itself, but finding something worth writing. And there's only so much that's worth writing for a single person. The more you write, the more compelling themes you burn through.
So while it's not specific to this book, the work I struggle with the most is of the "driving around to encounter a sign that says "Sakura Town"" variety.
— I imagine many readers have been waiting eagerly for a new book over these 6 years. Do you have a message for those readers?
To speak my personal thoughts, the ideal distance between a writer and a reader is for them to have a strong awareness of each other's presence, yet not make eye contact. As such, while I don't have a direct message, I'm truly grateful that people would buy my books and read them in a world brimming with so much low-cost amusement. I hope that my self-centered enjoyment can, if only by coincidence, shake something in the hearts of readers.