The Story Behind the Story
I got the idea for The Champion of Reason while staying on a houseboat on Nagin Lake in Kashmir, India. It was in the spring of 1983, and it had been six months since I, an aspiring author, left the U.S.A. with $3,000 in traveler’s cheques to go backpacking around Nepal and India.
When I finally ran out of money, I headed for Japan. The Japanese economy was going strong and the ‘economic animals’ were trying to internationalize themselves by learning English, the international language.
I went straight to Kyoto, the historical heart of the country, and was soon living in a cramped rooming house on the poor side of town and teaching conversational English at a language school in the concrete heart of Osaka.
Bodnath Temple in Kathmandu
I did quite a lot of work on The Champion of Reason, but within a year I was stressed out and burned out and badly needed to get the hell out. So I got my backpack back out and took off for six months of backpacking – to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Myanmar, India, and Sri Lanka. Along the way, I got re-energized and resumed work on my action-packed story about a thinking-person’s superhero.
With just thirty-five dollars left to my name, I went back to Kyoto to give it another go, and the second time was a charm. For starters, I found a nice house to live in at the foot of Mount Inari, home of Fushimi Inari Taisha, a famous Shinto shrine founded in the eighth century.
Through orange torii gates, I walked up and down and all around that mountain. It was wonderfully surreal at night, when lights cast shadows along the torii-tunnelling. My favorite spot was a private place at the top, where I liked to sit on the ground and look out onto the lights of Kyoto, and think about things.
Some of the torii-tunneling that runs up
and down and all around Mount Inari
Things were going well, very well. I was living in a land where teachers were greatly respected, and I wasn’t just any old teacher. I was an American, teaching English, the international language, at a time when the Japanese were making a really big deal about the importance of being internationalized.
I landed some good teaching jobs that got better and better as the yen became stronger and stronger. Before long, I was raking in the yen. That was weird because I’m not good at making money. I’m a writer, pure and simple, with more emphasis on simplicity than on purity. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I developed a few good connections.
I taught only twenty or twenty-five hours a week, which gave me plenty of time to write. My best friend called me a “maniac” for the way I threw myself into my writing. When I needed rejuvenation, I found a substitute teacher and hit the road with just a shoulder bag for six months at a stretch of more off-the-beaten track traveling. I hiked in the Himalayas, ate dog with tribes people in a remote area of the Philippines, and smoked opium with village chiefs in northern Thailand. I could go on and on because I did go on and on.
But I kept going back to Japan to pick up where I had left off, because where I had left off was a great place for me to be as a writer. I had plenty of time to write, and the money I was paid for teaching was big and easy. I mean big, and I mean easy.
When I first planted myself in Japan, I was thinking that maybe I’d stay for two years; I ended up living there for fourteen. The setup I had was just too darned good to say “sayonara” to. Man, I had it made in the shade in the Land of the Rising Sun.
I lived on Mount Inari for three years, and then I moved way out into the countryside, to the castle-town of Nagahama, where the legendary warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi centered himself before unifying the country.
The place I rented in Nagahama was an old-style, thatched-roofed house on the outskirts of town. The interior had big, exposed beams, impressive woodwork, sliding doors, new tatami mats, and a squat-style toilet. Outside, there was a big Japanese garden, and a well.
Being the only westerner in town, I stood out. But I didn’t care. I was an English-teaching star. I was respectfully called ‘sensei’. Shit, I was a man of distinction. (Pardon my English.) Some people even went so far as to refer to me as “erai hito” (great person), perhaps because of rumors that I was a celebrated novelist in America. Hey, all I ever said was that I was a novelist, but you know how stories get embellished when they start circulating, and the townsfolk of Nagahama sure were talking about the ‘gaijin’ (foreigner) in town.
The first thing I bought for my new home was a computer so I could get The Champion of Reason out of longhand. Aside from my savings and my ‘wardrobe’, which was not a whole lot more sophisticated than the wardrobe of the average Zen-Buddhist monk, my one and only possession was that computer. Even the old bicycle I rode from my house to the train station and back was not mine; it was lent to me by my landlord.
I lived in that house for six years. Every other year, I left the country for six months of world traveling to stay fresh and keep on pounding away on my satiric story, narrated by an outrageous, seven-foot-tall freelance photographer who learns the identity of the Champion of Reason and becomes his accomplice. One of my favorite places was a quiet beach on the Thai island of Koh Samui. Another place where I got a lot of work done was on the Greek island of Crete.
I finished The Champion of Reason while living in Nagahama. Also while living there, I met an angel named Sawako. She was one of my students at the NHK Culture Center in Kyoto, and she took the same train home after class that I took. One thing led to another. I proposed to her at my favorite look-out spot on top of Mount Inari.
Me and Sawako, for a New Year's card
Sawako and I got married in September of 1994. On the last leg of a three-month, around-the-world honeymoon (Turkey, Greece, England, Scotland, Canada, and the USA), we stopped in Portland, Oregon to visit the family Sawako stayed with for one month during her college years. I liked the ‘Rose City’ as much as Sawako did. We decided that when the time came for us to leave Japan, we would settle in Portland.
Three years later, in the fall of 1997, we were more than ready to leave Japan. Sawako had actually been ready for a while, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to wrap up The Geographer, the cross-cultural fiasco I started shortly after we got married.
We rented a nice apartment in Portland on Park Avenue. What the hell, money was not a major obstacle because we had some money in the bank. We didn’t have a lot of it, but it was a nice cushion. If I hadn’t traveled as much as I did during the fourteen years I lived in Japan, we would have had a much nicer cushion, but I had no regrets about that, none at all.
Downtown Portland and Mount Hood
I had already decided to self-publish my books, and to do so under the name Soaring Sparrow Press. The plan was to kick things off by self-publishing The Champion of Reason and The Geographer simultaneously, and then later, perhaps much later, come out with The Book of Wind. I had three-thousand copies of both The Champion of Reason and The Geographer manufactured at a company in Denver.
I was ready to take America by storm. I had a business name. I had a logo. I had business cards. I had posters. I had a website. I had a distributor. I had a storage unit. I had a supportive wife. I had energy. I had confidence. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.