Our Man in Abiko's Blog

There's a new blog in town, specialising in old news. Guaranteed to be at least a month out of date. It's called Letter from Abiko.

If you miss Our Man's dry voice, there are echoes... just not in third person.

He has started blogging again under a cover name, though only once a week and rarely about politics. Think of it as a poor man's Garrison Keillor for ex-pats in Japan. Or possibly that crappy strip that Berkley Breathed did after the awesomeness that was Bloom County.

Anyway, the latest post is The doorbell never rings once. Try to form an orderly online queue now, no shoving at the back.

Our Man in Abiko: Are you a proper writer?
Patrick Sherriff: I don't know if I'm proper or not, I just do it. I've just published my second novel, I'm working on my ninth textbook for Japanese kids learning English. I've published two short stories, an essay on how to write about Japan that was downloaded over 15,000 times last year and I published my first adult colouring book last month. So. Are you a proper blogger?

Hey, hey. Our Man asks the questions here. Why does everyone want to be a writer? What's wrong with being a rock star like in the good old days?
I don't have the looks to do anything else. I can't speak for others and I can't second guess myself all that well. What can I say? It's just one of those things. People say you have to have passion to be a success at a profession, I guess that's true. The closest thing to a professional passion I have is writing. There's just something about it that gets me going. Maybe I was praised at an early age by a teacher, and I wanted to get my dad's approval? I'm a natural-born smart arse, what else is there for me to do? I spent 13 years in newspapers, but when it became clear even to my short-sighted eyes that newspapers were dying, I was kind of relieved to put the 19th century hierarchies inherent in the newsroom behind me. Hey, in the modern world you don't need any of that stuff, just an internet connection, something to say and you're away.

Do you want to take this opportunity to slag off traditional publishing and praise the world of self-publishing?
Not particularly. I think the business is moving on. Trad is in decline and the self-publishing business model is becoming the industry default. People can argue all they want about whether that is a good thing, I have argued that it is, but the reality is the successful business model will prevail, whatever you or I think. And that's not the traditional publishing model. (The clue is in the title "traditional"). Anyway, readers don't care about the publishing industry, they care about good books.

So what's the new book about?
Year of the Talking Dog is the latest adventure of Hana Walker, a half-English/half Japanese orphan who finds she is on her own when her fiancé is killed in Tokyo.

Sounds pretty morbid...
It isn't really. Hana's quite the resourceful heroine. She has no choice but to find solutions to problems herself. She's an honest person, mostly, so when she becomes aware of a masked man following her on the streets of Shibuya, she must keep her wits about her to stay one step ahead of him and find out what really happened to her fiancé. As she says in Year of the Talking Dog, decisions are easy when you have no options.

So she's completely on her own?
Not completely. There's a drunken Shinto priest, family friend Uncle Kentaro, whose "help" is problematic to say the least and a nerdy manga fan convenience store clerk who takes a shine to Hana.

Ooh, a love interest?
I couldn't possibly say.

Where did you get the idea for the character of Hana Walker?
I had an idea back in 2010 for a mystery exploring the problem of international child abductions in Japan. I thought I needed a protagonist who could straddle the different worlds of East and West. I took my own biracial, bicultural daughters as a starting point and just upped the sassiness on the page. Then the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown happened and that became the natural backdrop for the plot of the first Hana Walker mystery, Half Life.

So folks should read that one first?
No need to. Year of the Talking Dog makes sense on its own with a complete, self-contained story. But of course, read both of them to get a stronger sense of the characters and their world.

Can we expect to see any more Hana Walker mysteries soon?
Yes, I've started work on the third one. It will be out before the end of the year.

One last question. What's the meaning of the title, Year of the Talking Dog?
That would be telling. But I will say this. Back in the 1990s, I was chatting with an Australian English teacher on Yasakuni Dori in Kudanshita, Tokyo. A Japanese tourist was clearly lost and my Aussie pal gave directions to the underground station in Japanese. The tourist was stunned to be addressed in flawless Japanese by an obvious foreigner and stared at him. My friend laughed. He said: "It's like he just saw a dog put down his bone and start talking." For some reason that line stuck in my head all through the years.

* * *
Patrick Sherriff is a former newspaper journalist with stints in the US, UK and Japan. He is working on his third Hana Walker novel in between writing and illustrating textbooks for non-native speakers of English. He lives in Japan with his wife and two daughters.


Click on a link below to get Year of the Talking Dog right now for a special introductory price from any Amazon store, including  Amazon.com ,  Amazon.co.jp ,  Amazon.co.uk ,  Amazon.co.au  and  Amazon.co.in

Since we apparently live in a Brexit post-industrial, post socialist, post-corporate, post common-sense world, certainly in the UK, how about a party political realignment along the lines of a pro-Foreigner party and an anti-foreigner party? Other distinctions seem moot.

Just a thought.

Also, Our Man is in the process of shifting a few saucepans and old jam jars out of the larder to make room in the bunker for a British Government in Exile, should the country start taking on water and have to be scuttled in the next few days.

It's been 36 hours since news of the Brexit earthquake reverberated around the world. The shock has worn off, but not the horror.

Our Man is not going to list how bad things are now, or how bad they could get for the people of Britain and the prosperity of Europe and all that. You are either aware of that now, or soon will be. The candidates for leading fascist state of the dystopian future always struck Our Man as more likely to come from some odd spot of the world, not his homeland.

But Our Man is a lover of ironies. Here's one he'd like to see come true.

In order to preserve the existence of the (fairly) liberal democratic United Kingdom with a final chance to avoid a descent into darkness, he'd like to point out that the referendum vote to leave the EU is not binding. It will only become a reality if the lawmakers of Westminster push it through.

Our Man says:

It's the responsibility of Parliament to ignore the result of the referendum.

How? Not sure. That would require a level of leadership, balls, and communication with the people of Britain not seen in the country for a generation.

Why? Because to preserve democracy and the continued existence of Great Britain, the new government has a duty to ignore the will of the people this one time.

Ironic huh?

Then the real work of fixing what's broken with democracy begins. The alternative is as dark as night.

Our Man knows that the minutes after  horror  has been committed are absolutely the wrong time to jump to conclusions.

But in these few minutes, he will say this: stir the pot of nationalism, jingoism and race-baiting and what did you expect you would get? 
I'm looking at you, all you tabloid purveyors of hate, Britain First brown shirters but also the mealy mouthed British political party leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a paper bag.
In a representative democracy, we elect folk to make the tough decisions on our behalf, not to wring their hands and throw the thorniest questions back at folk incapable of making an informed decision. 
That is a side of democracy we've forgotten in our quest to make everything a tick-box, a Britain's Got Talent beauty pageant.
But the reality is not beautiful. Stir the pot and the shit slops everywhere. 

Our Man doesn't imagine for a moment that you, gentle reader, give a flying fuck what he thinks about the US presidential elections, and nor should you.

But he just wants to put this out there:Donald Trump will win.Here's Our Man's reasoning:
a) At every step of the way, the consensus has been that Trump couldn't possibly make it to the next level, but he keeps doing it.b) Leicester City won the Premiership. This was an impossibility, but it happened.c) Nero. Our Man may have got his causations and coincidences confused, but this is it. Rome is burning and here is Nero fiddling.
That's it. Move to Canada all you want, but the world is fucked.
Can I flog you a stress-relieving adult colouring book? 

It's been exactly five years since the earthquake struck in Tohoku, causing a tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

I don't really have anything much to say about it all, or rather, I have too much to say that really isn't relevant. I have been fortunate and never suffered from the disaster, it's others who had it worse who should be in our thoughts now.

I did write a book (well, actually an illustrated essay) about travelling around Tohoku to talk to survivors of the tsunami last year. And to commemorate the fifth anniversary, I'm giving it away for free from Amazon for the next few days.

If you'd like a copy of the book, Children of the Tsunami, click here and click on one of the links at the bottom of the post to download it.

May the horse be with you?

Our Man knows it is traditional at Chrudmas to flog whatever rubbish the marketing dept has alert over and that  sell sell eslell tis the reason for the season. So here ya go. All dressed u p and nowhere tp go. THIS WAS HOUR MAN'S FIRST NOVLE. NPW YOU CAN GET IT FOR FREE. LCIKC HERE AND there is salsa a funny short story throwjn in too, I am nor oa Foreingnvn.

AKA, a free couple of biooks for you. Merry Christmas. Honto ni.