I had intended to write only one book but long before the first book was finished it became obvious to me that the story I had been given would not be contained by it. My characters seek power, they are flawed and they make mistakes, but they love life and grasp everything it has to offer. One is not a monster, the other not a super-hero. Iida has been corrupted by power, whereas Shigeru is compassionate by nature but essentially they are the same. Iida Sadamu and Otori Shigeru are from the same class and background. There are no traditional villains in my story though there are antagonists. I wanted to write a ‘fantasy’ set in a feudal society, but I wanted to write about real people whose emotions are all the more intense for being restrained by the codes of their society. Whenever democracy and the rule of law break down human societies seem to revert to feudalism. What is not said is as important as what is stated. So the style is spare, elliptical and suggestive. I wanted to see if I could use silence in writing. I like the concept of ma: the space between that enables perception to occur.
In Japanese art and literature I am fascinated by the use of silence and asymmetry. I could hardly contain my excitement and emotion, yet actually to write it was painfully difficult. I was in Fukuoka when the entire ending of the book fell into place. I carried my notebook with me and wrote on the road, on trains and planes and in waiting rooms. I became addicted to gel pens and bought them by the handful. I heard everything but was more or less mute myself. When people spoke to me I had to listen intently, using my ears as I had not done since I was a child. Everywhere I tried to picture how my characters might have lived five hundred years ago. I walked in the mountains behind the arts village, through the rice fields and by the river. I visited samurai houses and looked at artefacts in museums. I often went to Hagi, the old castle town of the Choshuu clan.
Slowly the world of the Otori began to evolve. Now I had several weeks alone in Japan in this idyllic place the challenge was to see if I could bring to life what had lain within my mind all that time. I like to occasionally use Japanese idioms translated literally to give the feeling that the book is not written in English.įor many years before I had steeped myself in Japanese history and literature, reading widely, watching films, studying the language. I wrote ‘My mother used to threaten to tear me limb from limb.’ Later I changed this to ‘into eight pieces’. I was writing in a notebook with a black gel pen I’d bought in Himeji. Water trickled from the pools around the artists’ residence, carp splashed and occasionally a kingfisher swooped above the pool. I was in Akiyoshidai International Arts Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture it was a damp, humid afternoon in September. The first novel in the epic Tales of the Otori series, Across the Nightingale Floor is followed by Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon.I started writing Across the Nightingale Floor with the four main characters in my head and the opening sentence in Takeo’s voice. Set in a mythical, feudal, Japanese land, a world both beautiful and cruel, the intense love story of two young people takes place against a background of warring clans, secret alliances, high honour and lightning swordplay. Lian Hearn's stunningly powerful bestseller, Across the Nightingale Floor, is an epic story for readers young and old. He has love in his heart and death at his fingertips. But sixteen-year-old Otori Takeo, his family murdered by Iida's warriors, has the magical skills of the Tribe - preternatural hearing, invisibility, a second self - that enable him to enter the lair of the Tohan. Its surface sings at the tread of every human foot, and no assassin can cross it. Summary In his palace at Inuyama, Lord Iida Sadamu, warlord of the Tohan clan, surveys his famous nightingale floor.
Across the Nightingale Floor - Tales of the Otori Book 1 Lian Hearn
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