Edokko

 Yikes, it's been a while! I'm so sorry not to have much to share these last few months - or rather, I have tons, but have been so caught up I haven't written any of it!

Last Monday, my second novel launched in paperback and as a Kindle Unlimited exclusive.

I began working on Edokko when I was newly back in Canada and truly felt the sting of leaving Japan behind. It's a joy to see it finally in print, and the publishing process brought me back to those early days (don't miss the cameo of the Japan Foundation's Japanese-Language Institute Kansai, where incoming Osaka JETs gathered for language lessons when we first arrived!) and the ups and downs of expat life. I still miss it very much.

Available now in paperback and ebook format

 

Lily Jennings is Going. To. Japan.

Sixteen and on top of the world, she's beyond excited to be setting off for an entire year as an exchange student in Tokyo. Fashion and fun are foremost on her mind as she arrives ready to meet her new host family and embark on a grand adventure, livestreaming all the way.

What Lily isn't expecting, however, is for her urban host family to cancel at the last moment and leave her hanging with nowhere to live. She's shipped off to the small town of Ajimu (sorry, where!?), a billion miles from anywhere cool and exciting, with a neurotic host sister, no chances for romance, straight-up-vile classmates and a microscopic community watching over her every move.

Too bad for the people of this small town—nothing's going to hold Lily back when she wants something!

Find it on Amazon or your favourite retailer via http://edokko.lorengreene.com!

Hachiko Paperback Is Coming

Well, it's been a tumultuous 8 months, and with the absolute tanking of my industry, yours truly is back at her computer full-time. 

Doing what? Well...I've decided to turn all my attention to my writing, going forward. 

I never expected this, after more than a decade away from my freelancing career, but in that decade I happen to have completed or partially-written 4 novels (two of them Japan-centric), so it felt like the universe was giving me a boost. A boost in which I am stuck in my apartment with 800+ COVID cases popping up in Ontario daily, no job, and the very helpful support of my partner telling me he'd rather I not be working in any job where I have to leave the house. So here's a trial period; for the next eight months, working on these novels is my job. Taking them from unfinished to finished, and doing all the necessary polishing and marketing, is my main focus right now, starting with Meet You By Hachiko. 

So what's new? Well, after 8 months on the Kindle Store, Hachiko is finally getting a paperback copy!

There were definitely points in time when I honestly didn't think this book would ever be on anyone's bookshelf. It was originally a project in my free time leading up to Christmas 2009. I thought that a story about two teen girls, Canadian and Japanese, bonding over their interest in early-2000s Harajuku street style was a touch too niche for most mainstream North American publishers, and teen fiction is well out of the usual scope for the Japan-centric publishers. 

Thanks to progress, though, of the kind I never could have imagined in 2009, here we finally are! Within the next six weeks, the paperback will be on Amazon. After that, who knows what's next!? You can find it on Amazon Canada, or Amazon.com. 

 Expect this blog to be coming back in some capacity as well, when I need a break from the editing drudgery. 

 It's a tough time to be missing Japan (when I was last there, in no way did I ever think I would be away from it this long!) and blogging about that probably isn't going to help much, but maybe I can make it a little easier on those of you who are missing it, too. 

 Thanks for sticking with me!

It Finally Happened

Something was holding me back for a long time, but you know what? I decided, a ridiculous ten years later, that I was going to put this out there.

Thanks all, for your support!

Writing About Tokyo

Commemorating the 1964 Olympics at Jingu Bashi

I don't think I've ever mentioned on Tadaimatte before that I had written a novel - it's true! 

As you might have guessed, story writing is an outlet for me, and in 2008 while living in Osaka, I devoted quite a lot of effort to penning my first book. At the time, I was enamoured with Tokyo, and deeply interested in studying the evolution of popular culture in The Big Mikan. I went to the library in Hikarigaoka and thumbed through photos of the area from the 60s, I penned thoughtful poems about umbrellas and imagined the lives of the people bobbing through Hachiko Square, watched Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, traced the steps of Shiki and Beat and Neku from The World Ends With You, read vintage Tezuka manga, attended Comiket, visited all the shops Shigesato Itoi recommended in interviews about MOTHER, sat on the bridge at Harajuku, visited Tokyo 1964 Olympic sites, trolled Jimbocho bookstores in hopes of finding the original 1983 English translation of The Rose of Versailles, and generally fell in love with the way the city had been depicted in works of fiction. I used words like hokoten (short for hokousha tengoku) and expected people around me to actually know what they meant.

In reality, Tokyo - particularly the long trip I took alone in 2008 - was a fairly private experience, simply because I didn't know anyone else who got excited over things like Olympic plaques, croquette rolls and showa retro. I spent something like twelve days wandering the city mostly alone, with no plan, eating curry and rice balls and occasionally having only the vaguest idea of where I was going to spend the night (!). I visited Yokohama and Hakone during this memorable vacation, but spent most of it in Shibuya and Odaiba, having real "down time" in Tokyo for the first time.

One post couldn't possibly sum up how I feel about the capital...but I suppose that's why I wrote a book. I sent it around to just a couple of publishers, as it was such a specialized topic that I couldn't imagine a big company picking it up. I've sat on it long enough now, though, that I've begun to think that self-publishing is the way to go - as intimidating as that is!

So, over the next weeks and months, I'll be continuing to work on this project with the help of my good friend Zippo, and maybe soon you'll be able to download the book right here!

*edit*

And now, you can! Whoa! Check out Meet You By Hachiko on Amazon!

Tower of the Sun

Prose

They said I would have my own empire to stand over, and it was true; for no one stood closer to the sun than I.

When I came to life, my kingdom was but a crater in the earth. Metal, sand and plastic stretched as far as my eyes could see, but I sensed that gleaming potential in every direction. My eyes, looking hungrily future-ward, already knew the world as it would be.

And it would be glorious.

Back then, I gazed upon parkland and the beginnings of the wheel; when they placed the Golden Mask upon my face, it was then I came to have Suita within my sights. Suita was ahead, and Festival Plaza, behind. I would see everything that was, and everything that would be.

I saw it all, my kingdom, my subjects, from there on my knoll. 

When you anticipate how your short life will end, or how it will begin to end, the most magnificent sense of perspective becomes yours. The years between my birth and the day they prised the Tree of Life from my body were no more than a moment for me – and with that my empire too began to disappear, bit by bit. Soon my protection was all but gone, along with everything else. I stood alone.

My faces, though, kept staring in all three directions – past, present, and future. I never wavered from my task, even when the lights of my eyes went out completely. Even when my kingdom – for so long that pinnacle of the ‘future’ – was razed to the ground. I could descry my own end as sharply and clearly as I understood that the future I represented would never materialize. The dream had long ended.

Ah – but was it so bad? After all, only I was blessed – or cursed – with the knowledge. No one but I could see the whole of Osaka in quite this way. And though others came who dwarfed me in stature, it was still I who would be ever nearest to the sun.

Short Story - The Floating World

The foreigners always took photos.

She loved it, being photographed. Kumiko made certain never to look at them or indicate she had become aware of their presence - the ones who were afraid to come close and ask, that was. When a Japanese tourist approached to ask for a photo, she nodded demurely, never parting her lips or raising her eyes.

She also never posed. Best for her admirers to believe she was always off to her next engagement; one delicate step away from being whisked off to the floating world, where some lucky guests who could afford the price of high culture witnessed her in her element.

The foreign tourists were suitably awed, and the Japanese tourists excited, but it was the locals she appreciated most. They nodded her way, whispering 'geiko!' - for no Kyoto-born would ever use the word geisha among themselves. Bad enough that the rest of the country used the Tokyo term, when Tokyo’s geisha had all but vanished. The ones Kumiko loved most were natives who correctly identified her as an apprentice; a maiko. When someone called her a maiko, she knew she had passed their test.

She'd yearned to be part of the floating world since she was small. Kumiko had seen them on television - the images of beautiful Kyoto geiko, hidden behind their fans, fingers draped over koto strings like so much silk. Her mother bought her a fan that Kumiko had carried for weeks, practicing folding and unfolding it, like the blossoming of a lotus.

She had been to Gion many times of course, since she was born and raised in the city, but the day she had debuted at sixteen was not so soon after the age that Kyoto maiko often had their misedashi.

On that day, standing in the studio with her giggling classmates, Kumiko wondered what had caused her to forget her dream of being a geiko. Was it fear of her clumsiness? Joining the softball club in fourth grade? Some other childish whim? She hadn’t considered it in so many years. She’d even hesitated at this invitation from her friends today. As the kimono dresser firmly knotted her obi, though, Kumiko heard her classmates admiring themselves, squealing over how authentic they looked. Just like real geiko!

When she turned and looked at them through red-lined eyes, Kumiko didn’t think they looked like geiko at all. Their posture was all wrong, and Eri stood with her legs apart, like a soccer goalie waiting to make a dive. They smiled with their white teeth shining through the lipstick. No - not even close.

Kumiko couldn’t say anything, though, because she felt as real as they did. When she looked at herself in the mirror, plain old Yamamoto Kumiko was gone, and in her place was someone beautiful, someone exquisite. The green kimono flowed like water over her small frame; the long furisode sleeves hid her hands, but when she freed them, she could imagine that fan again, opening slowly; the lotus awakening after sleeping through countless winters.

(Continue)