Why Japanese? (And Roman...And Norse)

I love fantasy. I love dwarves and elves and dragons. I love kings and knights. I love representations of feudal Europe and the Catholic Church. My favorite book series are The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. As a simple glance at the earnings and popularity of the visual adaptations can attest, many people agree that they are very, very good. In my mind, they have become the definitive fantasy versions of what they contain.

When I pick up a new fantasy book that has dragons and knights, I inevitably compare them to these definitive versions. Let’s call it a vice. I do the same with any new versions of cinematic Batman. To my mind, The Dark Knight trilogy is the definitive version, and anything else is an impostor. I’m finding more and more that regardless of how well a medieval fantasy is written, they always lack the wonder I long for. It feels like I’ve been there before.

When I set out on my journey to create my own world, I wanted a breath of fresh air. I thought of several possibilities for inspiration, such as Greco-Roman, Indian, Chinese and of course, Japanese. After much deliberation and fiddling, my love for Japan won out.

Japan had everything I was looking for. A unique political system that was both different and familiar to a Western audience. An influence on North American pop culture in the form of samurai and ninja’s. And a fascinating integrated belief system that allows for new ways to understand and explore life. And most of all, while there are certainly many wonderful examples of Japanese culture used in Western stories, I feel that there has yet to be a definitive high fantasy inspired by it.

As the ideas gained clarity, some of the other cultures I had considered crawled their way back into the picture. The classic concept of Rome vs Eastern empires remained firm in my mind, and when crafting a world where both could co-exist naturally, Nordic cultures reemerged as well.

The end result is a world that is strongly based on Japanese culture, but has natural give-and-take with the other cultures to form something else entirely. The Odicians (Roman) have a touch of Japanese. The Ainoens (Japanese) have a touch of Roman. They do not feel like two worlds being forced into one, but a single world with believable social and economic flow based on a shared history.

The World

The beauty of fantasy is that it can be enjoyed for many different reasons. It provides a blank slate where anything is possible. It can explore the depths of philosophy and emotion in ways that stories based in the real world cannot. It can provide a thought-provoking reflection of the real world. It can provide the same weight of character struggles as other genres. It can excite the imagination to dream of untold possibilities.

It is the last that primarily draws me to the genre. I treasure getting lost in worlds. Nothing makes me more interested than a consistent and captivating world that I can get lost in for hours and days. It is why I am so captivated by The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. They have complex structures with deep histories. I can easily snuggle up for a day with a cup of tea just reading about all of the smaller stories that are mentioned and see how everything fits together like a puzzle. Tomes like the Silmarillion that are as much a history textbook as a novel fascinate me.

The idea of consistency is what resonates with me the most when I consider worlds that I love and worlds that didn’t quite do it for me. There is nothing that frustrated me more than seeing a world get a new chapter and have it contradict or nullify previous work. It brings me out of the world. It is no longer feels like something True that could really be out there somewhere that is worth my time learning about.

While these stories can still be greatly insightful and entertaining, they go from being something truly special that stays in my heart to just another story that I will go through and largely forget. Unfortunately I only have so much time in a day, so when I invest that time into a world that becomes relegated to a backdrop, my disappointment is palpable.

All that said, this is one of my primary goals with The Eastern Lands: create a living, breathing world that feels organic. All of the characters, races, and cultures share this world and craft it. Once something becomes established in a concrete manner (characters and in-world histories are fallible), it will only be expanded upon, never contradicted.

Happy reading!