MBC’s own Sarah Broadley has been putting author Mina Ikemoto Ghosh through her paces today with a fantastic Q&A about the author-illustrator’s YA title – Hyo The Hellmaker. Delighted to share Mina’s generous insights about her process, inspiration and challenges.
1. Hyo the Hellmaker has many twists and turns throughout the narrative. A high fantasy concept, please tell us how you planned all the character arcs, settings and plot points?
Haha, I do like a twisty book! I wasn’t sure how much Hyo would count as one, but it sounds like I managed to build in some hairpin bends.
Plotting it was fairly straightforward, in that I knew I was working with the Japanese four act kishotenketsu story structure, and that the ‘climax’ or peak of the ‘ten’ point should be when Hyo was finally commissioned and could unlock her powers to avenge her murdered friend. That meant that I knew that Hyo needed the bulk of information to achieve that by the third act. Roughly, I could then divide up the story before that into ‘Part 1 – initiation of the story, the body is discovered’ and ‘Part 2 – investigation, interrogation, establishing the world’s rules’.
You can probably guess from the language I’m using that I was drawing on more from murder mystery puzzle story beats than I was from high fantasy, so the most important thing regarding characters was to keep track of their information levels, and who knew what at each moment, who was withholding what and why, and what change in their mental-physical-emotional situation, or what key piece of information, could be used to unlock them. That probably made up the biggest part of my character plotting.
The other thing I strongly wanted to have in the book were break scenes, where the characters had to cook, wash, and do laundry. They’re mundane, but I’m a massive fan of slice-of-life-type mundanity in the midst of high fantasy. I tend to see high fantasy not so much as magic and monsters but placing stories in imagined cultures, which so happen to have living with magic and monsters woven into their everyday. This was something of a treat for me to write after more challenging points.
And there were challenges! Probably the biggest challenge in the plotting was the gods. I have the Wavewalker touch on this in the story, but gods by their nature could potentially be everywhere and anything at any time, if only specifically somewhere and something at one specific time. That meant I had to find reasons for gods not to be watching or present. Thankfully, the idea of wards, boundaries, and protective talismans are commonplace in relation to spirits etc. in Japanese culture (and in other East and South East Asian cultures, but I don’t know enough about their specific nuances to comment on it here), so that gave me some tools to work with. The gods meant that a lot of my plotting became about figuring out reasons for why something COULDN’T happen when pretty much anything could.
I should also note that this project was incredibly self-indulgent, so a lot of the settings are chances to write about things I enjoy. I knew from the zero draft that a lot would go down at the theatre. It’s a dramatic place for dramatic things to happen in, and I love the idea of stage and backstage as a metaphor for the workings of a murder mystery novel trick, with how the crime is presented by the murderer with lots of dazzle to conceal the real mechanisms, and how the crime comes together with the murderer’s unseen backstage efforts. I also wanted the death to happen on a bridge, mostly because it was a tribute to this one bridge at Kyoto Studio Park that appears in loads of Japanese period dramas, and I wanted to imagine I was filming my own story there!
2. With Wavewalkers, gods, demons, spirits and many more – what enticed you to use these as characters in your novel?
To be honest, I didn’t really think of them as lots of distinctly different things as they’re all part of the same landscape of Japanese lore, so it was less using creatures and more straight up playing on and playing with Japanese relationships with the unseen world. My grandparents had a couple of shrine shelves in their house, one for a kitchen watcher, and another for two gods, one of which they’d totally forgotten the name for, but they still offered them salt and rice, and had me sweep away the dead leaves, just in case. It’s a relationship that’s cautiously and carefully neighbourly at the same as respectful. All I did for Hyo was make the unseen of our reality visible, by having her world be one in which our neighbour gods, and then ghosts, could be seen physically, and constantly. The line between ghosts and gods is thin in Japanese culture, sometimes even as shadowy as whether they’ve got a shrine or not. Famous ghosts have been made into gods (like Sugawara no Michizane and O’Iwa), and dead ancestors are often venerated as household guardians. Hence, since I had gods in the story, ghosts felt right, and then it felt like a natural extension to include demons, as similarly vengeful formerly human creatures.
The gods definitely came first in the plotting. I think I was interested in gods as characters because whilst we might often pray to them for good luck or good en (fateful connections), they too are vulnerable to bad luck and en, and can’t do much to help themselves in that respect. The zero draft of the story was about a failing and unlucky en-musubi god writing bad romance novels on an island so packed with gods he was being outcompeted for worship. Cue then a happy cosy romcom involving a hellmaker who sold curses for vengeances, making a mockery of the en and fateful connections the god so valued, and a dead body. Surprising no one but me, the closest I got to ‘rom’ was ‘roaming wrathful ghost’ and ‘com’ was ‘godly death coma’. Anyway, you could say that Natsuami was the first character I came up with then Hyo followed and took over the story with a vengeance!
The idea of the island came from lore that the old Japanese calendar’s tenth month (sort of November-ish on the present calendar) used to be called ‘The Month of No Gods’ everywhere in Japan – except for one place, Izumo, where it was called ‘The Month Where All the Gods Are Here’, because all the gods of Japan had vacated their usual homes to gather at Izumo. Izumo isn’t an island, but I imagined a situation where the rest of Japan had become uninhabitable to the gods, and they were all trapped in this one place, getting on each other’s nerves.
3. A humble nod to Japanese traditions and culture, what do you want the reader to take away from Hyo the Hellmaker?
Hahaha, I can’t claim to be humble in this case! Hyo’s very irreverent about present day Japan at points. Hmm, I think I’d like the reader to take away that they’d had a good time, hopefully, in interesting company. I want them to have had fun! That’s the most important thing.
If I’m lucky, they’ll go away with a broader idea of what Japanese fantasy can be? We have so much more to offer than ninja and samurai, and I’ve tried to write a tribute to that. The Onmyoryo and onmyoji are Japanese fantasy staples I don’t see often in English language books. Hyo’s fantasy world is very much built from a female perspective of the culture. The idea of kegare (taint, in the story) is a real-world idea that links closely to Japanese misogyny (that women are inherently more tainted than men), and Hyo’s cursing draws on a well-known real-world cursing ritual, the Ushi no Koku Mairi, that’s strongly associated with vengeful women.
At a pinch, it’d be cool if a reader might take away that conflict-based three act structures are not the only way to write stories, and that those of us from non-Western cultural roots, when we tell our stories, are going to bring those storytelling tools with us.
But fun and a good time first – although my idea of fun might need a little examining.
4. Is the island of Onogoro based on one you have visited or created independently for the novel?
It’s based on Onogoro or Onokoro, the first island created by the gods in Japanese mythology. It’s disputed as to where or which island or rock it is in present day Japan, and the original isn’t turtle-shaped, but the idea of all the gods gathering in a single location to do their job (party) is based on Izumo, and Izumo’s great shrine. For the high tech aspects of Onogoro, I checked out Singapore’s subway system to get an idea of how I might do the layout for the monorail, and for the daily life aspects of Onogoro, such as the use of blue-grey recycled paper over white, I had a look at Edo period practices that minimised waste production in a densely populated town. The word ‘tatenagaya’ for the long, thin vertical flats was my playing around with the ‘nagaya’ rowhouses associated with the Edo period. With the ‘tate’ I was saying, ‘Let’s imagine a nagaya row stood upright on its end’.
5. Illustrating such an intense story must have had its challenges. Can you tell us more about your illustrating background and the stages it took to finalise this epic novel?
In terms of my illustrating background, I was drawing pretty much since I could hold a crayon, so I’m self-taught. I was lucky my parents encouraged it, and I drew pretty much throughout my school years for fun, usually just characters from stories I’d been writing. As an adult, I ended up returning to drawing whenever I needed respite, or when life was on the rainy day side. Probably the best thing for my drawing was picking up the pen after graduating uni to draw for other people, for my friends writing fanfic, or publishing short fiction, or wanting gifts for people they cared for. That helped me rethink the whole grim practice into something that could offer small joys. In 2019, I hit something of a wall, and friends convinced me to apply for a professional development course for under-represented illustrators. My takeaway was that I could, potentially, draw professionally, but I needed to find my area – and since it wasn’t in middle grade illustrated books, picture books or graphic novels, I was going to have to fight my case for a YA illustrated novel. As a kid, I loved Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart’s Edge Chronicles, and I had an idea that it’d be cool to do something like those, where the illustrations acted as visual aids to dense world building.
Stages-wise, for the art, I got an initial art brief for Hyo around about the middle of my structural edits, but that brief fell to the wayside once it no longer corresponded with the scenes in the book. I started the cover towards the end of line edits, so I was drawing the cover before I’d started the illustrations or officially finalised Hyo’s character design. Once line edits were done, I was drawing from October through to mid-January, at the same time as working through the copy edits. We finished drawing in early January, except for a few final images that were needed to plug gaps in the layout. Those final images were the toughest, because I was starting to run out of compositions and ideas that didn’t overlap with images we already had. My art director was doing the lay-outs as I was sending in the pictures, and I’m so grateful to him because I would’ve cried trying to lay out this book by myself. Mid-January, we tweaked the last picture for consistency and found the last typo (as far as we knew at the time!), and it was all done.
6. What’s next for you, Mina?
I’m currently doing a new first draft for Scholastic. It may or may not be Hyo 2 ???? We will see.
Thank you for having me!
Mina Ikemoto Ghosh is the British-Japanese author-illustrator of the YA fantasy novel Hyo the Hellmaker. She has a BA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and MSc in Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford, and uses both for inspiration in her writing. You can summon her from the void with promises of noodles and karaoke. She lives in Surrey.
Be sure to follow the rest of the blog tour!
