David Kirk’s books are based on the real-life exploits of the legendary samurai Musashi Miyamoto. We have had the pleasure of talking to him as the second book in the Musashi Miyamoto series, Sword of Honor is being released.
Sword of Honor is the second book in your series about the life of Musashi Miyamoto. Can you tell us a bit about it?
The first book followed Musashi up to the age of 16, and his choice at the battle of Sekigahara to reject ever serving a lord as a samurai. This book is very much dealing with the aftermath of that decision. Saying you are independent and living independently are two very different things, particularly when you stack yourself up against an ancient dogma the adherents of which all carry sharp swords and to whom the idea of vengeance is saintly. But more than that the ramifications of his confused and violent upbringing still hold him in sway, he having been taught to be a killer and an idealist at the same time, What does he truly want? What does he truly believe? He’s angry, very angry, a suicide bomber who took the vest off, and yet has retained the zealotry, turned it upon those who armed him. In Sword of Honour, Musashi is far from the wise old sage that wrote the Book of Five Rings, but in this book we perhaps see him taking a step closer to one day becoming that man.
The time period you write about is a very turbulent and important one in Japanese history, with the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate among other things. Have you always been interested in Japanese history?
My dad gave me a copy of Shogun by James Clavell when I was young, 12ish or so, and it fascinated me. A year or two later I also played Shogun: Total War on the PC (and the sequel just a few years ago), which may have cemented my interest. However, as an author I’m not so interested in the political machinations of the Tokugawa and the Date and the Takeda, but rather what life was like for the individual in those times. The life of a samurai, to me, was hell. Imagine having to live with such paradoxes as being expected to be entirely selfless to the will of your Lord to the point of suicide at his command, and yet simultaneously expected to be fiercely proud on the individual level of name and heritage to the point of beheading those who slur you. Do you endure? Do you reject? Can you reject?
That being said, the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate and in particular its presence in the ancient capital of Kyoto do play a significant part in Sword of Honour. Musashi may or may not inadvertently become involved…
Why did you want to tell this story, was it Musashi Miyamoto’s famous book The Book of Five Rings or something else that triggered your interest?
Initially, I wanted to tell stories about ancient Japan without having Tom Cruise turn up and learn how to use a katana and bang a sexy geisha ninja princess in a week or two, then go back home having learnt some vacuous lesson about duty or selflessness or the like. Musashi, I feel, is a more easily relatable protagonist for westerners than a by-the-book samurai – the lone wolf, the one who walks alone, who commands himself etc. It’s a very romantic image, and of course everyone loves a huge bad ass who gets stuck in with a sword. However, after thinking about him for the four or five years it took to write these two books, he presents a very confusing figure. Yes, he thought for himself, but then you realise then that therefore he chose – entirely of his own free will – to wander around the country and kill at least sixty men, of which the most morally presentable reason for doing so is nothing more than simple sport.
Then you think and you try and excuse him and say that he was simply a product of his times, that murder was acceptable in feudal Japan, but then you consider that this was also a realm in which Buddhist monks would let mosquitoes drink their blood rather than kill them, such was the sanctity of life. So you swing the other way and assume him some crazy sociopathic brute, but then you remember that he studied painting and sculpture and metallurgy and on and on…
He’s a deeply interesting character, simply on a human level. That he happened to write perhaps the foremost tract on samurai/his own psychology in The Book of Five Rings is a bonus.
Many aspects of Musashi Miyamoto’s life are documented well while others are harder to verify. How do you deal with this in your writing?
I don’t sweat it too much, keep to the broad beats in terms of chronology, and that’s about it. There’s debate whether he was even at Sekigahara that closed the first book, but how could I have him miss the defining battle of his time? The famous incident at the Ichijo temple with the Yoshioka school of swordsmen that closes this novel is also significantly different to how it occurred, simply for the sake of the themes I want to discuss.
What are the biggest challenges when writing historical fiction?
The balancing act between veracity and entertainment, pertinent information and unnecessary detail. Particularly with an alien culture (talking from a European perspective), you risk swamping your prose if you try and describe what everyone is wearing, how buildings looked, why a certain person might respond in the way he does per the code of bushido, and so on. And yet you can’t not describe these things. Making things worse is that ancient Japan was also a very, very exact and defined culture, in which the way, for example, a woman’s obi belt is tied reveals her marital status and numerous other things. Do I waste a paragraph explaining this, the name of the particular knot or bow she chose, and how it looked, or do I simple say ‘Lady Chosokabe was a widow’, because that’s all that is relevant to the plot? Some people love these incidental bites of knowledge, others hate them. I need to please both these groups.
Can I use ‘minutes’ or ‘seconds’ to gauge time in the narrative, given that these were measurements unknown to those in the story? Do I explain that the ‘hour’ of the traditional Japanese clock was actually more equivalent to two hours in the western sense, and varied in length from season to season, measured simply as six even divisions between dawn and dusk, and then six more between dusk and dawn?
Dialogue is tricky also. Ignoring the fact that my characters talk way, way more than actual samurai would for the sake of drama, this book is set in 1600-1604, loosely contemporary to Shakespeare. Do I have my characters speak like that? Do I directly translate what they might have said in ancient Japanese? Can I slip an ‘ain’t’ in there, to show someone is uneducated, or is that pushing it? Alternatively, how archaic can I go? Would the average modern reader understand ‘enfeoffed’ or ‘sprent’?
(Incidentally, I learnt that my editor really hates the word ‘welkin’)
You have visited many of the locations in your book, how has that influenced the final result?
Not always in helpful ways. I tend to go there and find out a bunch of cool things that I want to talk about, and yet – as I mentioned above – most of them are detrimental to the flow of the plot. Yeah, it’s cool as hell at the Sanjusangendo hall was built eight hundred years ago and yet has rudimentary earthquake negating foundations, but is that really necessary to the swordfight happening outside it?
What is your plan for this series? How many books will there be?
I have books three and four planned out, and most of three written. After that I don’t know how many. I suppose five would be fitting for Musashi’s story.
All this is dependent on sales, however. I haven’t signed any deals to publish book three yet, so Sword of Honour may be it.
You actually live in Japan so we also have to talk a bit about that. What are some of your favourite things about Japan and what has been the most surprising thing for you?
Japan is a nice place to live for a self-employed author. I get all the good things of Japanese society like the peace and security and the high quality of living/services/food/everything, without paying the crushing individual price the average Japanese does, enduring twelve hour days and terrible wages and having to suck up your emotions because its shameful to display anger or disrupt the harmony of things etc. I wouldn’t live here doing a Japanese job, put it that way.
After seven years I think I’ve overcome most of what I found surprising when I first came. Ultimately people are people and beyond the superficial spectacle of a foreign language and karaoke and anime, I feel Japan is not that different from the UK. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do in a way with the books – de’orientalize’ the orient.
I’ll tell you the one thing that I still haven’t gotten used to, though: groups of young men will go shopping for shoes and clothes together. That still seems really, really weird to me.
What books inspired your career as an author, and what authors do you enjoy now?
In terms of raw inspiration from on early age, it was probably Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell that really got me into reading and trying to write cheap Discworld/Sharpe knockoffs in my early teens, and also – being honest – the ultraviolent fluff parts of Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks. Now I tend to read literature. A top list of authors I rate now would probably comprise Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Iain Banks, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but thats a very malleable list…
What is your favorite and least favorite part of the writing process, and why?
I like the process of imagining and envisioning things in my head. I intensely dislike the process of corruption when I try and affix these things to paper/the screen. The hardest part of writing is forcing myself to sit down and turn the computer on. After ten or twenty minutes or so, I tend to get ‘in the zone’ so to speak, and can write for a few hours. I’ve been real bad re: productivity this month, the weather in Japan right now is humid as hell and I have no aircon in my office, so its doubly hard to take that first step.
So what do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?
Necessity has made me take up cooking. There’s plenty of nice things to eat in Japan, but if I want the taste of home I gotta do it myself. I’m getting pretty good at steak pies.
Totally off topic, but one of my favourite things about Japan is the abundance of vending machines. What is your favourite type of vending machine?
All the crazy ones you’re probably thinking of are down in Tokyo. Up here in Sendai they’re relatively tame, selling the usual things. I kind of like the gumball machines, because you can find toys in them from all over the place. I have a facehugger from Alien sitting on my shelf right now which I got for 400 yen. I’ve seen Lionel Messi machines, Tron machines, AKB48 themed Gundams machines, Incarnations of the Buddha’s Wrath machines…
We also have to talk about the future. Besides Musashi Miyamoto’s story, are you also considering other writing projects? Do you have other tales from Japan you would like to write about?
I’m currently taking a break from Musashi and writing a novel about the Shinsengumi, the most ultra zealous group of samurai ever assembled. I’m also developing other contemporary novels, with more elements of dark humour involved. Historical fiction forces the author to write in a very particular way, and I cannot use my ‘natural’ voice so to speak. It’s also a very niche market, so expanding my ‘brand’ by writing something of a broader appeal cannot harm my career.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
Hello, I am a huge fan of the Musashi series and this is the only information I could find regarding the release of the third installment. If possible, could you share with me the contact information of David Kirk? I would love to reach out to him to speak about his plans for the series. Thank you!