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CORRIDOR
OF MYSTERY |
DARK CORRIDORS Vol. 1, No. 10 |
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interviews Dale Furutani  Author of the Samurai Mystery Trilogy |
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Furutani's Samurai Mystery Trilogy Plumbs His Ancestry
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In one of the most exciting interludes in Dale Furutani's new novel "Kill the Shogun," the wandering ronin known as Kaze is being tailed through the dark, twisting streets of medieval Edo, the city that one day would become Tokyo, by a deadly ninja assassin and his skilled team of professional killers.
Not only do the assassins have Kaze outnumbered, outmatched in terms of weaponry and boxed in on both ends of the narrow street, but they also have the advantage of total surprise. They are so silent, that they have slipped up on the ronin like ghosts. Yet, when the head ninja gives the subtle bird call sound that will launch the attack, he realizes he's just made his first mistake.
Kaze knows they're coming.
After
so many years of fighting all kinds of enemies in all the worst
places, Kaze has trained his wary mind to instantly register
any sound that somehow doesn't belong -- and that low whisper
of a bird call is something you just don't hear at that time
of day in this part of Edo. And, so, to the ninja's eternal
regret, he finds himself charging down on Matsuyama Kaze, one
of the deadliest men in all of Japan, and sees the intended victim's
keen-edged fighting sword is already drawn.
Well, big deal, you may think. You've already seen what a cruel
and vicious killer the ninja is. How can Kaze expect to survive
his attack while being attacked on all sides by killers of almost
equal skill? Heck, the ninja could even stand back and
just toss knives at Kaze until he's cut to pieces. After all,
the man never misses with his throwing weapons -- and
Kaze is just a human being anyway, isn't he?
Don't worry. I won't spoil your fun. Anyway, if you've been wandering the roads of 17th century Japan with Matsayuma Kaze before, you already know how resourceful he can be -- and how many cold-eyed killers like the ninja have realized, way too late, that the stuff they're slipping on in the killing zone is their own entrails, not those of the man they've come to kill.
"Kill the Shogun" is a great page turner, surely the most exciting novel I've read all year. It finally brings the noble Kaze to the end of the quest he began two novels ago in "Death at the Crossroads" and continued to pursue through "Jade Palace Vendetta." In those books, Kaze tried to fulfill his promise to a dead woman, the wife of his slain lord: To find her kidnapped daughter and free her from her captors.
So, in "Kill the Shogun," Kaze finally discovers that the royal child is now known as Kiku-chan and is being held in a fortress-like brothel in Edo, a grotesque bordello designed for perverts who fancy sex with little girls and boys. If he can somehow break into that stronghold and get her out, Kaze fears what he may see in her tortured eyes.
As if that wasn't enough of a challenge, Kaze also has another little stumbling block: He has been wrongfully accused of being the assassin who attempted to kill Tokugawa Ieyasu, the new shogun or emperor of Japan, so every samurai in the bustling capital city is out looking for him, not to mention the assassins who have private contracts to bring back his head.
"Kill the Shogun" is the final book in the so-called "Samurai Mystery Trilogy" by Dale Furutani, one of the most acclaimed new writers in the field of mystery -- and the only Asian-American author to ever win one of the coveted annual awards in the mystery genre. (He has both the Anthony and the Macavity awards.)
Though Furutani's first two mysteries were contemporary novels about Los Angeles amateur sleuth Ken Tanaka ("Death in Little Tokyo," "The Toyotomi Blades"), his Samurai trilogy is a much more ambitious work -- a vivid re-creation of 17th century Japan, seen through the eyes of Kaze, an unemployed samurai or ronin, the Japanese equivalent of a feudal English knight whose king has been killed and his estate laid to ruin. Furutani was drawn to the subject matter because he's a long-time student of Japanese history, but also because there may have been a Kaze in his own family.
"My family was involved with samurais," said Furutani on the phone from Los Angeles. "Our family's clan was a branch of the Tokugawas."
In 1868, when the shogunate finally fell, a date Furutani compares in importance to 1776 and the coming of the American revolution here, his ancestors arrived by boat on the shores of the Japanese island of Oshima. The boats contained nothing but Furutani women and children because the adult men had all been killed in battle or committed ritual suicide after suffering defeat. Because they were on the shogun's side -- the losing side -- the women and children were put out to sea, as Furutani tells it, "to either live or die as their wits or good fortune would have it."
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In general, the displaced members of the Furutani family did well.. Dale's grandfather, who arrived in Hawaii in 1896 to work as an indentured servant, managed to become a prosperous fisherman -- until his boat was taken from him at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
One would have to say, though, that Dale started his part of the story with some heavy strikes against him. For one thing, his mother was ostracized by the family because she gave birth to Dale, who is half white. Dale, whose legal surname is Flanagan, was adopted by a white merchant seaman who was nearly illiterate, but still loved to read, even if it was a terrible struggle for him to get through every book.
"This
book, and every book I write, is a result of his love of reading,
which prompted my love of writing," Furutani wrote at the
beginning of "Kill the Shogun," which is dedicated
to John Flanagan, his adoptive father.
Furutani now believes being born a child of two cultures gave
him an important ingredient for a writing career.
"You always felt like an outsider in both cultures," he explained. "I think that's very good for a writer because it makes you an observer. I think most writers are kind of voyeurs, in terms of observing life around them."
Furutani lived his first five years in Hawaii as a Buddhist. When he was five, his parents moved to Los Angeles and he wound up going to a Methodist church. He took to Christianity so well that he even was offered a scholarship to become a Methodist minister.
"I didn't feel a calling, so I didn't take advantage of that," he said.
Now Furutani finds himself turning more to Zen Buddhism as he grows older, not because he's turning away from Christianity, but because he has learned to take what he can find of value from both cultures.
"It's a very comforting way of dealing with life," he says of the Buddhist religion. "We live in such a materialistic society that there's such a huge need for people to find some kind of moral underpinning."
Furutani didn't begin looking into his family history or Japanese history in general until he was much older. For one thing, he was estranged from the Japanese branch of his family until he was an adult and attitudes had started to change about intermarriage. Ultimately, though, Japanese history became almost an obsessive interest. Meanwhile, he learned much from an uncle who had done a thorough investigation of the family's history, linking the Furutanis to the era Dale wanted to write about.
"I'd been reading about it for pleasure for years," said Furutani, "so I felt I had a pretty good grounding in Japanese history. Still, I bought more than 150 books for my research library before I started to write the first book in the trilogy."
The first two books have been widely acclaimed by book critics and several Japanese experts in Tokugawa Era history have complimented Furutani on their historical accuracy. But the great thing about them for American readers, regardless of their ancestry, is that the novels are exciting and the historical-cultural content is easily and painlessly absorbed.
For instance, in "Kill the Shogun" Furutani wanted to have Kaze hide out in a Kabuki theater where the elaborate makeups and costumes would do a good job of concealing his identity. Then, in his research, Furutani learned that Kabuki was barely getting started at the time of his story and was, in fact, considered a rather scandalous form of entertainment since it featured dancing girls who often aroused the male customers, then serviced them later, backstage. (Girls weren't allowed in stage productions until then.)
Rather than abandon the idea, Furutani decided to run with it. As a result, we see Kaze accidentally helping "change the nature" of Kabuki during his brief time as a member of the performing company. It's a hilarious sequence of events and the information you pick up along the way is fascinating.
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After living with Matsayuma Kaze through three complete novels, Furutani was happy to see the character finally start acting a little independently. For instance, Furutani had no idea how Kaze was going to solve the problem of getting the little girl out of the fortress brothel. Suddenly, he found himself writing a scene where Kaze decides to go out into the country to sit in a tree where he can ponder the problem in quiet. Somehow it worked. Kaze comes up with the solution to his problem while sitting in that tree -- and, naturally, so did the author.
"I think that's a sign that a character is fully formed in your mind and has become three dimensional," said Furutani.
But for many readers, the action and swordplay will be the catnip that keeps drawing them into the next chapter. Though Furutani was a fencer in college, he claims he's no martial arts freak and didn't grow up playing samurai after watching all those Kurosawa movies with Toshiro Mifune.
"The truth is I had an uncle in Hawaii who was so serious about kendo that it turned me off martial arts," said Furutani. "To him, it was a way of life. He'd wake up at 4 in the morning and go to the dojo to practice. As a result, I can't view martial arts as a hobby -- as most westerners can."
If you've never read one of the trilogy, you may be wondering why they're considered mystery novels instead of historicals. The answer is each book stands alone because it has a distinct mystery for Kaze to solve. In "Kill the Shogun," he has to find out who really attempted to murder the shogun in order to prove his own innocence.
Though it's possible the story of Kaze could continue with more books, Furutani doesn't think it's very likely for the time being. His publisher, William Morrow, was taken over by HarperCollins between the second and third books and the new regime is not interested in more chapters of the story. Readers who know Furutani also was writing a third book in the Ken Tanaka series still may be rewarded if they're patient enough. Furutani has written a third of that novel and wants to finish it, but only small, low-paying publishers have expressed interest so far.
For the immediate future, Furutani is likely to leave the mystery field and move full-steam into the field of historical novels. He's presently researching three different novels to see which one he wants to tackle first. The one most likely is a "Cain & Abel" story set in a period of Japanese history that's somewhat earlier than the 17th century period of the trilogy.
In the meantime, he's not very encouraged by recent trends in the mystery genre, where consolidation of publishing companies has resulted in fewer chances being taken on new books and a greater emphasis on best sellers.
"The industry's in a sad state right now," he lamented. "What's really selling now are hardboiled police procedurals with lots of violence. They're all looking for the home run ball: books that sell 200,000 to 400,000 copies in hardcover. As a result, the mid-list is being wiped out and authors who have six or seven books in a series, selling 20-25,000 copies in hardcover, are being dropped."
But the good news is that "Kill the Shogun" did get published and it's such a good book that anybody who opens it up and starts to read is not going to forget the name Dale Furutani anytime soon.
© 2000 by Ron Miller. The drawings are from the IMSI Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA 94901-5506. USA.
YOU CAN
ORDER DALE FURUTANI'S "KILL THE SHOGUN" FROM AMAZON.COM,
THE ONLINE BOOKSELLER, OR FROM YOUR LOCAL INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE.
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