Welcome back to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast! Season 3 is here and in this episode we are excited to have T. Y. Garner with us to discuss his debut novel, The Hotel Hokusai. Tony is a Glasgow-based writer of fiction and poetry, and has worked as an English as a second language teacher for many years. We discuss a whole range of topics related to his gripping historical mystery novel, from writing challenges, inspiration, and major themes.
Check out Tony's website here if you'd like to learn more about him and his other writings.
If you haven't gotten your copy of The Hotel Hokusai, you can head over to our website here to order your own!
ありがとうございました！
Welcome back to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast! Season 3 is here and in this episode we are excited to have T. Y. Garner with us to discuss his debut novel, The Hotel Hokusai. Tony is a Glasgow-based writer of fiction and poetry, and has worked as an English as a second language teacher for many years. We discuss a whole range of topics related to his gripping historical mystery novel, from writing challenges, inspiration, and major themes.
Check out Tony's website here if you'd like to learn more about him and his other writings.
If you haven't gotten your copy of The Hotel Hokusai, you can head over to our website here to order your own!
ありがとうございました！
Júlia: Welcome to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. I'm your host, Júlia.
Annemarie: And I'm your host, Annemarie. And each week, we are joined by a series of authors, colleagues, and guests to talk about all things books and publishing.
*music*
Júlia: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. My name is Júlia Pujals Antolin, and I'll be one of the co-hosts for this season, along with fellow intern, Annemarie Whitehurst.
Annemarie: Hello.
Júlia: We've got some exciting episodes in the works for you this season following some of the new book releases happening this year.
Annemarie, can you tell us a little bit more about today's episode?
Annemarie: Sure. So we will be interviewing T. Y. Garner about his debut novel, The Hotel Hokusai, which launched on the 18th of February this year. Inspired by true events, The Hotel Hokusai explores the Glasgow Boys' little-known time in Japan during the late 1800s through the perspective of another foreigner, young Korean immigrant Han, weaving a traditional who-done-it tale that examines disparities in race and class under the shadow of Western colonialism.
Set in 1893, The Hotel Hokusai takes place in Yokohama, a melting pot of international influence and opportunity at this time, as well as Japan's portal to the world. It's air hangs thick with an intoxicating miasma of loneliness and desire but fails to mask the emerging stench of death. When a young woman is found drowned in Yokohama Harbor under suspicious circumstances, downtrodden Korean eel salesboy, Han, compels the eccentric Glaswegian artist, Archie Nith, to seek the truth, though it requires more of them than just naïve integrity to paint a picture of what actually happened.
Written from the perspectives of both Han and Nith, The Hotel Hokusai follows their twisting journey as it snakes all the way from Yokohama's harbor to its red-light district. Can they grasp reality when the truth is as slippery as a basket of eels?
Tony, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today.
Tony: Pleasure to be here.
Annemarie: Great, and I'd like to introduce T. Y. Garner. He is a Glasgow-based writer of fiction and poetry whose works have been published in various print and online journals. Tony has spent numerous years teaching English as a second language and has spent time living in France, Italy, and Japan.
His work is often concerned with themes of migration and adaptation to new places, as well as writing and teaching. Tony produces creative resources for teaching English to speakers of other languages. Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and congratulations on the release of The Hotel Hokusai.
Tony: Thank you very much, Annemarie. Um, it's, it's been great since it was published. It's been a real journey of finding out what it's like to get a book out there in the world. For me, I've been writing for a long time, too long to put a number on the number of years perhaps. But yeah, to finally get a book out there and see people reading it and coming back to me and saying they've enjoyed it, it's been tremendous.
I'm really grateful to Ringwood, people at Ringwood, for helping get it out there. So thank you.
Annemarie: Yeah, it's been really wonderful. And I mean, the launch was such a huge success. We sold out of every couple we had there. Incredible. Great, okay. So, let's get into The Hotel Hokusai. Júlia, you want to start us off?
Júlia: Yeah, I'll start with the questions. So, the first one would be: coming from the fact that The Hotel Hokusai is your debut novel, what challenges did you face when writing the character of Han, in particular, because he has a completely different background from your own?
Tony: Uh, yeah, yeah. So, Han, as readers would know, is a Korean migrant to Japan at the turn of the 19th century, who speaks English thanks to his upbringing by this Scottish missionary, the Reverend Hare.
So, yeah, he is obviously set in a completely different time and place from where I grew up. I grew up in the Highlands of Scotland. Yeah, so just trying to pick up on the connections rather than differences between a character like that and use the experience that I do have that is relevant: arriving in a new country, which I have done (Italy and Japan), um, and, and trying to use, trying to adapt to life there.
And also, as a teacher, I've taught students coming from other countries and coming to this country. Um, so yeah, using the experience of myself and of people I've known and working that in with the background of this, yeah, it's very different person in a very different time and place. But there is enough, I think, that I have got experience of to work from.
Yeah, so it's the old, “Look at what you know, not what you don't know” kind of adage.
Júlia: Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. So like, talking about your time living in Japan, specifically, how did it influence your depiction of Han and Nith's experience of the country?
Tony: Yeah, well, Japan, I think Japan is one of these places that is extraordinary, you know, even by the standards of difference when you talk about going to another country. Japan is so different in many ways. It's kind of wildly strange to somebody coming from a Western country like the UK. So, yeah, things like the experience of levels of politeness, the way you have to use formal addresses for people who are just six months older than you, you know, these kind of things that seem to us quite absurd, which in Japan, you have to just realize that's how it's done and get on with it.
All these little things that happened to me when I was there. I had a boss in my first job in Japan, who was, to put it mildly, highly eccentric, highly irrational, I would say, and very difficult to work for at times, and to try to second-guess what he was thinking was quite hard. So, in Han's relationship with his first Japanese boss, Yamato-san, the eel vendor, I was using elements of my own experience, frustrations, trying to deal with the language at the same time as work, make a living, as I had to do, and as Han, even with even more urgency, has to do. Just this, the overload of the senses, really, that you get when you come to Japan, perhaps more than almost any other place. It's just such a tsunami of sensual images coming at you.
Annemarie: Absolutely. I like that Yamato was inspired by your own boss. You're not able, which Han does quite frequently, he's not quite sure what Yamato's thinking or how he's really feeling, you know, when he's like, Oh, is he angry? Is he upset? I quite like that. It's really great.
Tony: Yeah. Yeah. That came from my boss as well. I was never sure if he was really raging at me or he would smile, but I thought, What's behind it? I'm not sure if he's happy with me or if I've done something wrong.
Annemarie: That's great. And just kind of a little bit of a side path off of Han and his backstory … you just briefly touched on it, really, at the beginning of the book, but it's what sets the whole plot in motion, is his experience with his foster father, the Reverend Hare sending him to Japan as a missionary. And Christianity, like, had a huge foothold in Korea compared to Japan, where it really didn't take off much and they were persecuted pretty badly.
What made you decide on the Christianity-driven backstory for Han and what inspired the character of the Reverend Hare?
Tony: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. One that I hadn't even really considered in too much depth until you told me that you were going to ask for it. Yeah, there you go, I've given away that some, there was some degree of pre-drawing of the questions here. Oh, it's not as spontaneous as it should be. No. Yeah, now I have to try and formulate an answer.
Um, yeah, Christianity is the basis of, if you like, Western civilization, isn't it? It's the fundamental story that – well, you could argue that there's Greek myths and all that before – but it's at the basis of a lot of our Western culture, whether you're Christian or not, it's there.
So, given that it's a story about cultures and cultural encounters, I think it would have been remiss not to include Christianity as an aspect of the Western side coming to Japan. And also, the Reverend Hare is this missionary who has a very corrupted version of Christianity that he has presented to Han, who believes that it is the true story that he's hearing, but in fact it's not.
So, Christianity and any religion is a story, isn't it? It's a way of presenting the world and making it make sense, but then it's different from other stories in that people who tell it are wanting it to be taken as a belief system. So, at the time the book is set, the 1890s, I think this was a real moment where Christianity as a religion was starting to be hit by severe doubts from a large number of people, coming from Darwinism, basically questioning the creation myth. But then also, science was starting to advance further and further. We were conquering nature in a way that humanity hadn't done before, laying telegraph cables under the ocean.
You know, these previously unconquerable aspects of nature were being, to an extent, conquered by humanity. So, there was this new belief, maybe that Christianity wasn't enough to explain everything. And the doubt that comes in with that means that the Reverend Hare hasn't actually been able to accept Christianity himself fully and so wants to weave his own stories around it.
So, it's about doubt as well. That's a big theme. Cultural doubt, cultural, kind of, insecurities come in. And that's part of the encounter of Japan and the West. Each is looking to the other to try and maybe supplement something that they sense they're missing from their own culture.
So, there's the religion, the Japanese traditional religion as well, um, which comes up against Christianity. And out of that encounter, Han is caught in the middle of that encounter really.
Annemarie: And I think you did a really good job of reflecting the theme of doubt with Han's personal struggle to blend into a foreign culture, essentially. He's always going back and questioning, like, How much of myself, how much of my Korean heritage and culture am I retaining? You know, how much of that am I going to be able to pass on to my children? But I also am picking up the language, the Japanese language and culture really quickly.
He's basically a language prodigy.
Tony: Yeah, and another thing that I didn't say was Christianity as a vehicle for colonialism, obviously that, as you said, it was brought into Korea to a large extent, and the non-benevolent aspect of religion as a colonial vehicle, which Han's been exposed to.
Annemarie: For sure. What message do you hope that readers will get from the story of Han's upbringing and his integration in Japan?
Tony: I think if you want to talk about now, Han's a migrant who's arrived by sea in this country, right? So, if he was coming to Britain now, he'd be put on a barge or, as some people would hope, sent to Rwanda. So, he's the kind of person who might be coming here now, in a way, although it was such a long time ago and in a different place.
So, I hope that people see him and think about, every migrant who comes ashore in a new country has their own unique backstory. His is, perhaps, more far-fetched than most, but, you know, there are all sorts of shady characters around the world propelling people under their control in some way onto the shores of a new country.
And the person who's arriving there often isn't even the primary force in getting there themselves. You know, so in that sense, yeah, I would hope that people would maybe think more about, Oh, what is the story of every migrant who comes ashore? What's happening? Where have they come from? And also,
understanding more what it might mean to try and adapt to living, to come in with nothing to a new country, what you'd have to do to survive.
The flip side of that is the appreciation of being somewhere new, opening your eyes and looking more with the freshness of new eyes at a place. In this case, in the story, Japan, the thrill of travel, you know, the excitement of it as well.
Júlia: I totally agree. I feel like, especially with Han's first-person narrative, you get taken along with his emotions and it makes it so much easier to empathize with his experiences. So yeah, it's just truly wonderful how you can take the story that's set so many years ago and in such a different country as like Scotland, for instance, and still feel and see all those, like, parallels.
Tony: Yeah, the name Han comes from a Korean guy I taught English in Edinburgh. So he was called Han.
At some point somebody questioned, Is the name Han actually a possible name? Uh, and so, yes it is, because I taught a Korean Han who was about, I don't know, 19, and he was this incredibly self-possessed character who had done military service in the Korean army, been out in jungles, um, doing mock battles with North Korean invaders, mock, pretend invasion.
And then he'd come to Edinburgh, he wanted to be a nurse in Scotland. And he spoke great English, he did. He had the Scottish accent down after a few weeks. Yeah, I don't know, it's set in the 19th century, it's just used some people I met, um, in some ways, for the inspiration.
Júlia: Yeah, following on the theme of real-life inspirations, in the story, Yamato, the eel vendor and Han’s boss, basically takes him to the temple of the Dragon King. And we wanted to know if there is a real-life inspiration for this sea monster god?
Tony: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is a Ryou, dragon king god, from the Shinto tradition of Japanese culture, which was pre-Buddhist.
So, yeah, the symbolism of that, apart from just being visually impressive, this sort of whiskered, metal dragon statue that you can see in temples in Japan. There was one near where I lived that I was particularly taken by, just this bulbous-eyed dragon king. So, the idea of praying to such a ferocious-looking god was interesting.
You know, in some ways the Old Testament god is like that, isn't it? Some character, a figure to be feared. But it's not so obvious in the visual depiction of him as it is with the Dragon King, who's quite obviously monstrous. So yeah, there was that element of it where the Dragon King represents the Japanese pre-Buddhist tradition.
Yamato follows that and he represents also the sea, the unknown of the sea, where Yamato takes his living from because he sells fried eel on the waterfront. So, it's that connection really between nature and actual life, which I think is still strong in Japan. Maybe less, I mean obviously it's been industrialized so much, but you see it, you know, in the Ghibli films that nature connection, isn't it, that mythological link to the land and the past.
Annemarie: It's an interesting connection between Yamato, who, you know, worships this sea dragon, essentially. But he also works as an eel vendor, so it's almost like a cyclical thing where the physical characteristics of the eel are very similar to the Japanese dragon. Yeah, I thought that was really great.
Tony: Yeah, I hadn't even thought of that. But, but yeah, that is a nice image, the cyclical image. Yeah, I hadn't planned that at all.
Annemarie: Just subconsciously put it in there.
Tony: Yeah, yeah. Visually, it's the idea of the connection from the dragon to the eel as well. Part of the reason for using the eels was it's, you know, an image of slipperiness and things being difficult to pin down as well.
So, it connects to what I was saying about the doubt, the religion, it's hard to pin down. So maybe, maybe that's something in there as well. The dragon metamorphosing into the eel. Or maybe I'm just clutching at straws.
Annemarie: I mean, that’s what I got out of it, for sure. I thought it was really interesting, it almost is kind of Yamato's way of revering Ryou in his daily life, almost. His whole way of living, the way he makes money is dependent on the ocean where his god lives, you know. I thought it was really great.
Tony: Yeah, it's that connection, isn't it? So it draws his whole life together and it all makes sense to him. His life is a kind of coherent whole in a way that maybe you wouldn't be if you were a salaryman with a, going out in a suit on the commuter trains in Tokyo every morning.
Annemarie: The whole plot really, so much of the plot revolves around the ocean, you know, besides just the physical setting, but the whole mystery of the plot. The death of Tsubaki, the character who works at the Persimmon, Yokohama's brothel, was found in the ocean.
And just for listeners, at the beginning of The Hotel Hokusai, there's an excerpt from a report by the Japan Mail from May 13th of 1893, and it reads, “A 20-year-old girl, a resident of Tokyo, was found drowned in Yokohama Harbor on Sunday. She lately applied for the post in the telephone exchange, and her failure in this essay is supposed to have brought on suicidal mania.” And this was the inspiration for the mystery of the plot, right? You just, like, changed it a little bit. Yeah.
Tony: Yeah. Yeah. That quote is word for word copied from an 1893 edition of the Japan Mail that I found in the Tokyo, uh, sorry, the Yokohama Archives of History, where I originally went to research the Glasgow Boys, Henry and Hornel, the two Glasgow Boys, who did actually visit Japan in Yokohama in 1893. So, I went along there thinking that this is the source of the story. I need to find a bit more about the background of Yokohama at that time.
And then I was just leafing through this old paper that I'd managed to get. And came across this little snippet, just a side snippet, and copied that down. Along with other things like “Eczema, a book on skin troubles, is available for 4 yen” and a stamp, you know, just these little things that showed you what life was like at that time. But then, yeah, I came back to the thing about this 20-year-old and just the tragic aspect of it, somebody who had their whole life before them and died. But then it's the assumption that they've drowned themselves, but could that be proven?
So, I don't know. I don't know any more about the actual case, but it could investigate whether this was a suicide or something else.
Annemarie: Right, and going back to the theme of doubt, you know, it's just that very small seed that gets planted in Han's mind when he comes across Tsubaki and they immediately jump to: it was suicide. And he's just like, that seems off. And just that small seed of doubt sets forth the whole, the whole plot of the book and he's able to arrive at the truth of the matter just from that small little bit of doubt. So, he's really, the doubt really, I love that you mentioned that. It really is so significant throughout every aspect of it.
Tony: Yeah, yeah. And that and that keeps him going as well through his difficult time of adapting to life in Japan. The idea that he can investigate something and arrive at the truth about something when in other ways he's just overwhelmed by the experience, struggling in so many ways. This is, it's like a foothold for him, something for him to fasten on to and make sense of it all, navigate the world because he's trying to piece together.
Annemarie: For sure. I was curious if the Persimmon, Yokohama's brothel in the story, was inspired by a real place or …?
Tony: Yeah, very much so, very much so. Um, and I changed the name of the real place, the Nectarine No. 9 to the Persimmon No. 9, so a minimal adjustment was made there. Yeah, I found out about this place in a book, um, called, it was The History of Yokohama by an American, um, he was in Berlin, who settled in Japan after the war, I think, Urit Sabin was his name, and he provided a lot of details about the Nectarine No. 9 in this book. There's some old photos, an account of what it was actually like inside, the layout of the building, and an extraordinary amount of detail, really, which I was lucky to have in this account.
So I had to invent other, some aspects of it, you know, and that involves making these shady Jumps of where you have to imagine yourself running a brothel. And how would you actually organize it? You know, horrible. You wouldn't want to be doing that, would you? But how would it work? What would be the system of, you know, the men being set up with these, these young Japanese women? Mostly Japanese, not all Japanese, in fact.
So that the idea that they would be, little details, like that they would be able to select one that they particularly wanted, or they could just go with the chance of whichever young woman was available. So all these, yeah, this kind of idea of a brothel where I think the men who go there would have regarded it as a cultural experience, you know, so there's that really questionable aspect of it.
And obviously in the back of it was these women who'd been indentured, they called it, into serving for 10 years, I think, or five years, was the common time span as a courtesan in these brothels, which actually, yeah, that's how it worked. That's what happened. So Tsubaki and Tsutsumi and Bara are the three who I used as characters in the novel, but I wanted them to be rounded characters, not just in for a few pages and then disappearing again.
There's a photo in that book I was telling you about of all the women on the steps outside the Nectarine no. 9. So it's just a row of faces, two rows, and you don't know anything about who they were, names or anything. But yeah, there's something about a photo like that that makes you think, well, I wonder who they were and what they were thinking, what they were going through.
Júlia: No, I really like that because it's true, there’s a very fine line between, I guess, like, making this entire new story about them that might or might not be true and also just giving them a space as characters to be developed. And I think it is really good in the book because you do see their personalities and what they could be like.
But there's also so much that we don't know. Like, I remember reading it and feeling, I really don't know what's Tsubaki thinks all the time. I don't know who she is, but at the same time, I feel like I do. But yeah, no, I really like that sort of like dynamic.
Tony: Yeah, Tsubaki is maybe the most mysterious of all because she's the victim, um, and maybe the other two are a bit more present in the story.
But yeah, obviously that's, they were the hardest, in a way, to write for me because they're the farthest from my range of experience, but I could try to imagine.
Júlia: Yeah, we've already talked about issues of Western colonialism and race and class differences between like Han and the Glasgow boys. But I feel like expanding on our discussion of the person and then the institution that it was basically, could you speak to how this location (the Persimmon No. 9) and also the British consulate and it's relationship with it were also vehicles for these topics.
Tony: Yeah, to give a bit more background, the Yokohama was the international settlement where foreigners were permitted to live and trade in Japan from when Japan was opened up to the West again in about 1863, I think, or maybe it's earlier, but around then. And before then, for 250 years before then, it had been a closed country. The shogunate who controlled the country didn't want any foreign influence, so they were forced, really, at the barrel of a gun, an American gunboat, um, to open up part of the country.
So Yokohama was this kind of glass house, if you like, where foreigners were allowed to live. So it included French consulate, British consulate, Russian consulates, and there would have been a lot of diplomats and sailors and various foreigners and an unusually high number living in this small area.
But at the same time, Japanese people would have been there, too. So it was a melting pot in a microcosm that was good to write about because it was self-contained. And the British consulate was obviously the center of the British influence. So that really represented the idea that Britain at that time was in control, uh, in a way that Britain now is not, uh, despite some people's views. Britain is now a small island in the world, but Britain at that time still had its empire intact to a large extent.
And so, the British consulate, they really saw themselves quite arrogantly as above the Japanese in a lot of ways. So, the idea that there would be this malign, kind of malign, colonial influence coming out of it. And yeah, the Nectarine or the Persimmon No. 9, the brothel, that represents, you know, how foreign men, not only British, but other Europeans, would use the native women. And that represents, you know, the exploitation, the colonial exploitation in the form of using the women for sex. And then going back to their home country again, um, probably never mentioning it.
I think, yeah, this idea, it chimes in with the crime narrative as well, because it's things that are not said, things that were not really spoken of, you know, but they were a short distance away. In real life, you know, the British consulate, I went in there, it's now a museum, you can go in and have a look. There's all sorts of interesting historical paraphernalia around, but it's a 10-minute walk from, you know, the site of what was at the time, the brothel, and undoubtedly there would have been traffic between them. We'd have known what was going on.
But it was the idea. This is the world that we want to present. This is the image we want to present. And this is what's going on underneath, which is a big theme of the story as well and artistic representation is another theme. An image of Japan is presented to the buyers of the art the Glasgow boys are doing is this innocent, fragile, beautiful, um, restrained world. But in reality, it's a lot grittier and, um, there's currents of exploitation going on.
Annemarie: I really like how you mention how close they were as well. That's a really important point to note that they were just right around the corner from each other. They weren't as separate as people want to maybe put in their mind. This is, you know, “I'm one person at the consulate and I'm another person when I'm out with my boys” kind of thing.
Tony: Yeah, and it's, yeah, you can wander around if you, if you ever were in Yokohama for, you could peruse the locations in a day's walking, and less than that, in a few hours walking, and then go for some eel at the end of it.
Annemarie: Absolutely. And I think, speaking to that, in your depiction of the area, your depiction of Japan, your writing, your writing style, it gives such a rich description of the country at the turn of the 20th century, the architecture, the different cultures that were living there at the time. And this is, speaking more to your personal experience of living there, do you have any travel recommendations for people wanting to visit Yokohama or Japan, or advice for first-time visitors?
Tony: Yeah, um, well, Yokohama is definitely worth a visit, sure. And you could, the harbor, the waterfront is fascinating to wander around. I would also recommend getting off the beaten track, if you're going to Japan for the time, and not just exploring Tokyo and Yokohama, but maybe going out into the country a bit.
The hotel, which a lot of people, well, a few people have said, the Hotel Hokusai isn't actually a very big feature of your book called “The Hotel Hokusai”. So, there is an actual hotel that it’s based on, up in the hills near Hakone, which is southwest of Tokyo, if I'm not wrong, maybe southeast, if I remember. So, it's a hot spring town and visiting a hot spring, I highly recommend, if you've never done that before. Such an amazing, relaxing experience. Yeah, I'd say do that, definitely. Go up into the mountains and go to a hot spring.
Yeah, I was very lucky and I had some unusual experiences in Japan because my wife's Japanese. We met in Scotland, but then when my first experiences going to Japan were, I was able to be guided places by, uh, her and her family that I wouldn't have otherwise gone to. So, I went up into this mountain village in the mountains near Niigata, which is on the other coast. And yeah, setting off little fireworks at night in the middle of the forest with Japanese families, children. Yeah, just these amazing experiences that you wouldn't otherwise have as a tourist.
So, try and get out, even things like Airbnb, loathe as I am to recommend, you know, a big corporate website like that. When I traveled a bit using, using Airbnb, meeting these hosts who will welcome you to, I think, especially in rural places, people are more interested and pleased to have foreign tourists visiting. So you might have a good experience.
I had an amazing one in Tokushima, in Shikoku, where this quite eccentric but lovely host, um, took us out to her favorite tree, which was this enormous thousand-year-old cedar tree, um, and she told us that this was a god, that the tree was a god, we should respect it. So yeah, all these interesting experiences, if you can meet people, Japanese people, when you're there, I think that's always great. In any country, if you can meet the locals.
Júlia: I guess a human connection is one of the things that anyone seeks the most when one travels around.
The last question that we had to talk a little bit about the Glasgow Boys and painting. It's one of the drivers of the story and the way the Glasgow Boys and Han meet. And also just how Han, sort of, starts learning about painting and this world that is so, um, familiar to us and people who live in Glasgow, but obviously like so foreign to Han and Japanese people, at least like Western-style painting.
So, do you have any personal interest or experience in painting or art history, or was it writing The Hotel Hokusai that forced you to research it?
Tony: Yeah, I briefly studied history of art at university for one year as an outside course of my degree. So, I had some academic background. And I remember reading this book called The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich, I think his name was, about the whole kind of history of art from the beginning, um, through to now, and tracing how art has evolved, different purposes.
But I was always, even then, struck by how it's been in the service of, maybe more obviously than any other art form, it's been a way for powerful people to represent themselves favorably, or to represent the story that is at the center of power. So, religion was the source of a lot of art in the medieval period and after. And then you had figures like Napoleon representing themselves looking impressive, astride a big horse in the Alps.
And then so I think that background knowledge helped me appreciate where the Glasgow Boys were coming from and why they were radical. Um, whereas maybe if I hadn't had that background, it's just looking at the Glasgow Boys paintings of cows in a field in Dumfriesshire. You wouldn't necessarily look at that and think that's a radical painting because it's just by the standards of, you know, the 20th century it's maybe not. But what they were doing was painting scenes from ordinary, rural life or working-class life in Scotland that hadn't been done before really at that, at that time in the 1880s when they started out.
So, yeah, that, that helped me really to have that background knowledge and then it feeds into the character of Archie. The artist who wants to stay true to these roots of representing the working people, and he finds that the reason for him being in Japan, not actually marrying together with that, because he's expected to just represent the beauty of Japan and then show it off in the living rooms of the people who can actually afford the paintings.
Um, so yeah, there's always that element of any kind of art form. There's the commercial side behind it. You've got to produce something that people will buy, that will make money. And yeah, the specifics of Japan being this place that we see through an imagery of, you know, perfection in a lot of ways.
Even, you know, you think about how Japanese products are wrapped so immaculately compared to here. You know, my wife will always say when she gets the gift here, “Oh, they just shoved it in a bag!” you know, and it would have been in fact, everything is presented so perfectly in Japan.
Annemarie: Would you ever want to have the picture of Han at the eel vendor stall that Archie in your book, would you ever want to have it commissioned?
Tony: Well, I think, um, Sky Galloway, who designed the cover, has already bettered it with her fabulous eel ink coming out of the teapot. I'm more than happy with that. Um, so I'll just keep Han in my head. That's fine.
Annemarie: Fair enough.
If you haven't gotten your copy of The Hotel Hokusai, you can order yours through the Ringwood Publishing website, or if you're listening from outside the UK, you can head over to Amazon to grab a copy.
Great. Thank you, Tony. And thank you, Júlia.
Tony: Thank you. Yeah, just want to say thank you for the chance to do this. That's what I'd like to say. Thank you both. Um, it's been really enjoyable.
Júlia: Yeah, very insightful. Thank you to everyone who's listening.
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