I’ve been so focused on a new thing I’m working on that I nearly missed that my short story “The Onmyoji’s Wife” is now up at Abyss and Apex.
I must have been 8 years old when I first watched the miniseries “Shogun”, and it made a deep impression on me. It’s perhaps second only to Star Wars in its influence on my single-digit years. It was one of the first things I recorded in the VCR days, and I’ve watched it more times than I can count, the last just a few years ago when I showed it to my boys.
And yet when I was older and started reading about Japan, the time period that really grabbed me was before the samurai, before kitanas and kiminos, before even sushi: it was the Heian era. The complex life at court, the many-layered clothing, and especially the onmyoji. And one of the claimants for first novel ever written was from this time period:The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. I’ve written in this time period twice before, with“Tale of a Fox” at A Fly in Amber and with “Blood Ink”, which I posted on my blog here. I’ll probably write more, it’s a rich era.
Please do check it out, and if you enjoy it leave a comment!