"The Wind Phone"
Long ago, one of my elementary-school teachers assigned each kid in my class to pick a country and write "a book" about it. For whatever reason, I picked Japan, and I've wanted to visit the Land of the Rising Sun ever since.
Laurie had been there several times before, but always for work, which never afforded her much time for exploration. Finally, early in 2024, we both had the opportunity to at least begin to get to know the country, spending a full month in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Himeji, the islands of Miyajima and Naoshima, a Zen temple in Koyasan, and elsewhere.
Well before we left, though, I wrote this story, set in a small town far from any of the places we eventually visited.
The story was inspired by an article I read about the actual "wind phone," and all of the details included in the story are accurate. Thanks to the internet and Google Earth, I was able to get the geography right, and I hope the characters also come across as authentic.
On our return from Japan, I wrote another story set there, this one steeped in some of the experiences we had during our trip. As I write this webpage, it's premature to say more about that story, except that it's called "Me Japanese Boy, I Love You," and it's due to appear in an anthology of stories inspired by Burt Bacharach songs sometime in 2025....
"The Night Watch"
written by Marlen Visser
"In 2016, Marlen Visser's first novel was shortlisted for the Shadow Prize, a best-first-novel award for Dutch-language crime fiction. A founding member of the Moordwijven, a Dutch version of Sisters in Crime, she now has five more novels in print."
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