The Story Behind the Story
I got the idea for The Geographer while meditating, which I had been doing regularly since learning a Burmese-style of meditation called Vipassanna at a rigorous ten-day retreat during my second year in Japan. I did a variation of Vipassanna, however, by listening to ‘alpha music’ with headphones on.
It was 1995, and it was during the New Year’s holidays, called O-Shogatsu. Sawako and I had been married for just a few months. We were living in our new house on the outskirts of Kyoto. I was still teaching conversational English and still thoroughly enjoying it – and still laughing all the way to the bank about the way the yen was still packing a wallop against the dollar.
Anyway, I stopped meditating and jotted down what would become the first few sentences about a schlemiel named Winston Baldry, who knew everything about the world but had never been anywhere. I decided to set the story in Japan, where I had been living for eleven years. My goal, in addition to making readers laugh out loud, was to provide a wealth of information about Japanese society and culture.
A couple of weeks after I got the idea for the story – at 5:46 a.m. on January 17th of 1994 to be exact – Sawako and I were sound asleep in our futons when a 7.2-magnitude earthquake sent us straight up and wide awake. The epicenter was about thirty miles away, in Kobe. 5,500 people would end up dying in what would become known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake.
Fire damage after the Great Hanshin Earthquake
I decided that The Geographer would end with the Great Hanshin Earthquake and its aftermath, so I saved the following thirty days of newspapers for historical reference and went straight to work on the last chapter. In that dramatic last chapter, things are as they really were, with the only significant difference being that Winston Baldry is walking through the ruins of ravaged areas.
A couple of months later, I took another leave of absence and set off with Sawako for three months on a belated honeymoon through Turkey, Greece, England, Scotland, Canada, and the USA. On the last leg of the trip, we stopped in Portland, Oregon to visit the family that Sawako stayed with for one month on a student-exchange program during her college days. Sawako really liked Portland; I did too. So we decided that we would settle in the ‘Rose City’ when the time came for us to leave Japan.
Kinkakuji (the Golden Temple) is in the story.
We would have left Japan more sooner than later, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to get more work done on The Geographer. In the fall of 1997, I was ready to put the icing on the cake. I quit my teaching jobs and told Sawako that I’d meet her soon in Singapore. Then I headed off with my laptop to Malaysia.
I found a couple of nice, quiet beaches on the east side of the country and pounded away on my cross-cultural fiasco for sixteen to eighteen hours a day for six weeks, until I had all the pieces in place and had made the story as tight as the rush in Japanese straw mats called tatami.
After I wrapped up The Geographer, I met Sawako in Singapore. We spent a few months traveling in Malaysia, India, and the Maldives, and then headed for Portland.
In Portland, we rented a nice apartment on Park Avenue. Why not? I wasn’t worried about dipping into our savings for a few months because I was getting ready to sell my books. I had a storage unit with six thousand books in it: three thousand copies of The Geographer and three thousand copies of The Champion of Reason, which I self-published simultaneously under the name Soaring Sparrow Press.
Downtown Portland
I knew that self-publishing wasn’t going to be easy, but I thought that I could pull it off, sort of like a sparrow that can soar. I was out of touch with reality. The bookselling world is corporate-controlled from top to bottom and from the inside out. Self-publishing has a place, a very small place, but it’s at the local level, the very local level, and it’s in the Non-Fiction Section.
As a self-publisher of fiction, I didn’t have a chance. I thought that writing good books would be good enough. It isn’t. It just plain isn’t. I was a birdbrain. I probably should have named my sole proprietorship Stupid Sparrow Press or Foolish Finch Press or Ridiculous Robin Press or Moronic Magpie Press.
In the fall of 1998, about six months after we settled in Portland, Sawako and I went to two big book fairs, one in Seattle and one in San Francisco. At Northwest Bookfest in Seattle, we managed to break even because we stayed with friends. Unfortunately, we didn’t have friends to stay with at the San Francisco Book Fair, so there were hotel expenses and restaurant expenses on top of the expenses for a rental car and gas for the 1,300-mile round trip. It might have been alright if I had sold a few hundred books, but I didn’t; I sold a grand total of four books. Yes, four books. No, I’m not kidding.
I got knocked down many times, but I kept
getting back up.
I was battered and bruised, and I was scared. I didn’t know what in the hell I was going to do. For me, there had never been Plan B; there had only been Plan A, and that ‘A’ was for Author. Well, I sure wasn’t going to give up on Plan A, but for now, and for a while, I needed to stop our savings from shrinking. I needed to get a job.
I didn’t want to teach conversational English again because I would have been back to Square One with that. My teaching experience in Japan didn’t count for anything here in America; I didn’t even have a teacher’s license, much less an ESL degree.
I didn’t mind making less money, but I needed to keep moving forward. I was a writer, and I was following a dream. I was a married man, and there was that too. Well, I guess that was the main thing. On top of it all, Sawako was pregnant. I was going to be a father.
I checked the Employment Section of the Oregonian and didn’t see any job openings for philosophers. Philosophy was my major in college, you see. Now thinking back (philosophically), I couldn’t help wondering if I should have majored in something else. I also couldn’t help wondering if I should have spent a little time during my many years in Japan learning some other skill instead of focusing entirely on my writing. The only jobs I seemed qualified for were jobs that required no qualifications.
Juliáe, during a trip back to Japan
I wanted a job that could get me connected and enable the sparrow of Soaring Sparrow Press to get off the ground. It had to be a low-stress job because I was gearing up to write another book, and stress happens to zap my creative energy. I figured that bartending, in the right place, might be worth a shot. So I went to bartending school and learned how to make everything from a White Knight to a Black Russian. Then I landed a job in the members-only Red Carpet Club at Portland International Airport.
Red Carpet Club members were typically high-level business people, mostly guys, who flew First Class or Business Class and wanted to spend some time before their flights taking care of business or just relaxing. Cocktails were pretty basic. Not once in the eight years I ended up working there did I make a Mudslide, a Fuzzy Navel, or a Screaming Orgasm.
Many of the Red Carpet Club members were designated ‘1K’ for racking up more than 100,000 miles in a single year. Many of these ‘Road Warriors’, as they sometimes called themselves, were badly in need of a strong dose of stress-relieving laughter, and I had just the thing. In fact, I had two things: The Champion of Reason and The Geographer.
When people at the bar asked me about myself, I was quick to inform them that I was a writer and that I had written a couple of satiric, comic novels. If they seemed interested in knowing about the books, I gave them an informational flier. If they wanted to buy a book, well, that was easily arranged. I always had a few books tucked away in my daypack.