Wendy Jones Nakanishi, writing under the pen name Lea O’Harra, is the author of the Inspector Inoue detective series. She published Falling Leaves, the latest and last in the four-novel series, in February. The novel is set in rural Kyushu, opens with the kidnapping of a teenage girl by North Koreans, and then leaps forward in time to investigate the death of a Japanese-Korean college student.

I vividly remember the kidnapping of Megumi Yokota in 1977 by North Korean agents. I was living in Kyushu at the time, and news of the abduction was broadcast regularly on news and radio stations.

Wendy’s handling of the kidnapping in the novel is so vivid, capturing the horror the young girl must have felt as she is dragged into the unknown. I wanted to learn more about Wendy’s motivations and inspirations, so I sent her a set of questions.

Her answers are as riveting as her novels!

1. What inspired you to use the kidnapping of a Japanese girl by North Koreans as a subplot in Falling Leaves?

I first arrived in Japan in the spring of 1984, intending to stay only a few years before finding a university position elsewhere. After marrying a Japanese orange grower in 1987, however, and accepting Japan was to be my home for the foreseeable future, I began taking a greater interest in Japanese affairs.

One news item especially grabbed my attention.

In 2002, Kim Jung Il told Prime Minister Koizumi that North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens from Japan to teach spies Japanese and Japanese customs. Given all the mysterious disappearances of Japanese from the late seventies until the early eighties, suspicions had arisen about this possibility, but they were dismissed as improbable.

I, too, am a mother and felt moved by the plight of Shigeru and Sakie Yokota whose daughter, Megumi, disappeared in 1977 at the age of thirteen. Shigeru Yokota formed a group of abductees’ parents in 1997, campaigning for their release. Although people estimate they may have taken hundreds, North Korea has allowed only five captives to return.

Shigeru Yokota died in June 2020 without being reunited with his daughter, and Sakie, aged ninety, is the last surviving parent of an ‘officially recognized’ abductee. In recent years, she has often appeared in public, pleading for a last meeting with Megumi. The sight of that sweet, piteous figure featuring so often on the nightly news inspired me to incorporate her daughter’s story in my latest novel.

2. Falling Leaves is the fourth novel in your Inspector Inoue series. How did this series begin? What motivated you to create Inspector Inoue as your central character?

Although I have a doctorate in eighteenth-century English literature from Edinburgh University (my topic was the contemporary context of Alexander Pope’s published correspondence), once I accepted that my future lay in Japan, it seemed expedient to broaden my field of research, and I began publishing essays and critical monographs not only on Pope and his contemporaries but on such figures as John Ruskin, Thomas Hardy, Viriginia Woolf, and Iris Murdoch.

As an avid reader of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and PD James, I also got interested in crime fiction as a literary genre, writing academic articles and giving conference presentations on the boom in Japanese female crime writers in the eighties and nineties.

My research on such authors as Natsuo Kirino and Miyuki Miyabe led to my own foray into novel writing. Admittedly, the example set by Ian Rankin, a fellow post-grad at Edinburgh in the early eighties, also had tempted me, although I knew I could never reach his dizzying heights of success.

As for my choosing the burly and gruff Inspector Kenji Inoue as the protagonist of my series, having published creative non-fiction on my life in Japan as an American woman, I had become tired of—and even bored by—that limited perspective. I had already spent many years in Japan by the time I wrote a novel and felt I understood the Japanese mentality sufficiently well that I could explore the consciousness of a character completely different from myself: Japanese not American, a man instead of a woman, and so on.

3. I understand that this will be the last of the series. Why end it? And, what’s next?

In my early years in Japan, Japanese often told me that they and their compatriots possessed a special appreciation of nature. They would invariably follow up that assertion with the question, ‘Do you have four seasons in your own country?’ I would answer in the affirmative, trying to conceal my exasperation.

We also love the changing seasons, I would think. How dare they believe they have a monopoly on a love of nature?

However, after spending many years in Japan, I have come around to their way of thinking. I now believe Japanese do view nature in a special way. It’s partly attributable to the ancient Shinto belief that kami or gods or spirits inhabit trees and rocks, rivers and mountains. I think Japanese also have been influenced by the Buddhist notion of impermanence: they cherish the beauty of cherry blossoms because of its fragile transience.

The Japanese celebrate the four seasons with traditional observances. My dear mother-in-law, for example—now deceased—faithfully would choose a season-appropriate picture or poem to hang as a scroll in the tokonoma (alcove) in the front room of her old traditional farmhouse.

I was so taken by this charming custom that I decided to employ the four seasons in my novels as characters in their own right.

Imperfect Strangers, my first Inoue mystery, takes place in summer, and the sultry heat plays a significant role in the story.

Progeny, set in winter, features characters with frozen hearts, while I pictured the young victim in Lady First as a fallen spring blossom, her death an untimely end.

For years, I longed to complete the series with a book set in autumn but, for a variety of reasons, it took me ten years to publish Falling Leaves—a meditation on life and death, on endings and beginnings. Its publication brings the series to a natural conclusion.

As for future plans, I’ve begun a new series, but, like many Japanese, I am superstitious. As I worry it is bad luck to explain anything about my new writing adventure, I would prefer to say nothing.

4. You decided to use a pen name for your fiction. What was behind that decision?

My first Inoue mystery, Imperfect Strangers, takes place on the campus of the university on Shikoku Island where I worked full-time for thirty-one years, and its murder victim possesses many of the physical attributes and characteristics of a colleague still employed there. To throw readers off the scent (and particularly that individual, who might object to having his throat slit, even fictionally), I relocated the action to Kyushu and adopted a pen name. ‘Lea’ is my middle name, and ‘O’Harra’ is my mother’s maiden name.

5. You also write academically. Do you find the writing enterprise is different for fiction? How? Or, how is academic writing similar to fiction writing?

E.L. Doctorow famously compared fiction writing to driving in a fog, with the author only able to see as far ahead as the space illuminated by the headlights. I agree with this striking analogy and think it the most daunting feature of my new career as a mystery author.

While I always have a notion of my destination in academic writing and the path I must follow to get there, I am denied these comforting certainties when I write a novel. I need to make it all up!

Recently, I have been writing extensively on Iris Murdoch, one of the most popular British authors of the twentieth century, who produced twenty-six novels. What I most marvel at—and envy—is the fertility of her imagination. Murdoch was an important philosopher as well as a novelist, and her books typically include a huge cast of clever and idiosyncratic individuals wrestling with philosophical issues.

Murdoch was a ‘plotter’ rather than a ‘pantser’ and had all the episodes and characters of each new book worked out before she ever set pen to paper.

I, on the other hand, ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ with each novel, relying on a simple idea or anecdote as a starting point, with little idea of the trajectory of the story.

Of all literary genres, it is perhaps crime fiction that focuses most on plot, and figuring out an engaging mystery, including the requisite red herrings, is always a great challenge.

On a few notable occasions, I have completed a good half of a book before—like a kind of miracle—the identity of the culprit and the modus operandi become obvious to me. It is a phenomenon that has led me to believe in the muses that figure in Greek mythology. I feel I have benefited in my novel-writing by ‘a grace beyond the reach of art’ described by Pope in one of his poems.

6. I admire the way you manage to convey information about Japanese history and culture without being overly didactic or expository. (That’s one of my biggest challenges!) What are some of the challenges you confront when writing about Japanese characters and Japanese settings for an English-language reader?

Many thanks for your kind words.

You have pinpointed the very aspect of Falling Leaves I most labored and fretted over: trying to convey Japan’s troubled relations with the two Koreas without boring the reader.

It is difficult to strike the appropriate balance! I wanted to be ‘truthful’ while also keeping the reader interested and engaged in the story. I am not always successful in this endeavor.

Some reviewers of the Inoue series have complained about my repeating how my characters engage in typical Japanese behavior: bowing, stepping up from the genkan after slipping off their shoes, and so on.

As I write, I see my cast doing these things and—perhaps with unnecessary frequency—mention their doing so.

7. Where do you find your inspirations for your fiction?

I reside in a rural area of Japan, and many of the incidents I describe in my books are ones I’ve heard about, witnessed myself, or encountered on the radio or television.

My husband’s family has lived in this particular spot of Shikoku Island for centuries, and I love his stories about the complex interrelationships—feuds, romantic liaisons, betrayals—between those deceptively stoical-looking farmers I’ve lived among for decades.

Our neighborhood is also a place of stunning beauty: there are rice paddies, fig, loquat, and persimmon trees, and greenhouses of kiwi fruit and carnations and grapes. Our house is at the foot of a mountain, and the path to an old temple stretches up just behind our garden. When I help my husband pick oranges in the autumn, the view from the steep slopes is of the city of Takamatsu sprawled below, bordered by the Seto Inland Sea, dotted with islands and crisscrossed by ferries.

8. Any other information you want to add about your writing, experience in Japan, or future plans?

I want to confess that I feel life has blessed me, a sensation best expressed in Psalm 16.6 in the King James version of the Bible: ‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.’

I grew up in a tiny town (population five hundred and scarcely larger now) in the northwest corner of Indiana. Determined to see the wider world, I left the States in my early twenties and have only returned for the occasional visit since—living in France, Holland, and the UK as well as Japan.

I was especially fortunate to have ended up in Japan where I’ve learned important ‘life lessons’—the importance of self-discipline and maintaining harmonious relations with friends and neighbors, for example.

Above all, its fatalistic culture has instilled in me a conviction that this life is all we have, and that we must as Rudyard Kipling observes in his poem If, try our utmost to fill each ‘unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’.

More about Wendy here.

Falling Leaves: An Inspector Inoue Mystery (Inspector Inoue Mysteries Book 4) is available on Amazon in print, kindle, and audiobook.