LIAN HEARN, INTERVIEW

The true identity of Lian Hearn was until recently one of the most closely guarded secrets of children’s literature. Who was the author of the best-selling novel Across the Nightingale Floor, an adventure set in medieval Japan which readers from 8 to 80 became passionate about in the space of a single chapter? Was it a man or a woman? Was the author Japanese or European? Where had this passionate, ferocious, magical tale of revenge and love sprung from? Snapped up by Universal Studios and the producer of Indiana Jones, it is one of many crossover fantasies progressing, in the wake of Harry Potter’s success, to a cinema near you. Yet for three years, nobody knew who the author was. Eventually the word spread that Lian Hearn was Gillian Rubinstein, an English-born Australian writer of teenage fantasy. The rangy, white-haired, white-skinned woman sitting opposite me does not look remotely Japanese; only her extreme stillness and reserve suggests something that isn’t Western.

“Hearn is derived from “heron”, one of the key symbols in the books”, she says, though she was also thinking of Lafcadio Hearn, one of the earliest European popularisers of Japanese culture. It is this culture, both ancient and modern which today’s teenagers are obsessed by, to the extent that manga comics and anime films such as Miyazaki’s Spirited Away represent the must-have tokens of intelligence and style. Not that the zeigeist was remotely in Hearn’s mind when she began the Tales of the Otori.

“Japan was just the furthest away I could get from my family,” she says. “I wanted to do something quite different from anybody else.”

Growing up in the 1950s, it was not immediately obvious that Japan was where she would find her imagination flowering. To this day, the generation that fought in the War react against the Japanese. Hearn, however, found the Japanese aesthetic very appealing, and became completely hooked once she discovered Kurosawa movies. Having moved to Australia with her husband, it was much more accessible geographically, although she didn’t visit it until 1993.

“It felt very familiar,” she says; “their way of living seemed completely natural. Even in the middle of the modern world there is something very ancient about it. I heard a boy’s voice in my head which I tried to tell myself was too different, too much from an alien culture, but I knew I had to break the rules.”

The voice was that of her hero, Takeo, who at 16 return to his home among the Hidden to find everyone he knows has been slaughtered by the soldiers of the evil warlord Iida. Vowing vengeance, the boy is taken under the protection of another warlord, Shigeru, whose heir and champion he becomes: but he can only assassinate Lord Iida if he learns how to get across the specially constructed “nightingale floor” made of squeaking wood, in his fortress. The need to kill his mother’s murderer becomes all the more urgent because Iida is going to marry, and murder, the ravishing girl Takeo is madly in love with, Kaede. Takeo has one or two magic powers inherited through his father, such as being able to make himself invisible by an effort of will and possessing hearing more acute than a dog’s – but this in turn makes him all too desirable to his father’s tribe of assassins.

Gorgeously violent, complex and well-written, the trilogy about Takeo’s struggle to become ruler of his country and his destiny now has a fourth instalment, The Harsh Cry of the Heron, which tells the tragic story of what happens not just to the original pair of lovers but to their children. Hearn has steeped herself so deeply in the culture of medieval Japan that when we see European traders through the eyes of her characters they, and their customs, come as a shock.

“I read languages at Oxford, and found Spanish and French quite easy, but learning Japanese was extremely difficult,” she says. “I can read a newspaper in Japanese, but I need a dictionary to understand a history book.”

Totally obsessed by the world she was creating, she wrote each book by hand, feeling her way into the story and not thinking about anything else.

“There’s lots of very raw emotion – revenge is one of those things that is hard-wired into people, like a craving for justice,” she says of Takeo and his enemies. Yet counter to this is the influence of the Hidden, who are persecuted mercilessly by all but her hero, and who strongly resemble early Christians. These, too, are based on research, for by the 16th century Japan had 6,000 converts until missionaries were expelled and Christianity outlawed for 300 years.

Hearn herself had a conventional upbringing which included education at Church of England boarding schools. Her father died when she was 14, a “terrible loss to me and my sister which probably made us more eccentric than my mother.” She loved acting, and it was at Oxford that she received her first encouragement from her French tutor that she might be good at writing. After Oxford, and a spell at the LSE as a research assistant, she married then divorced a research chemist, met her second husband Tom, a journalist and publisher and moved to Australia. Here, however, she did not begin writing until 1986, when her youngest child started school. Space Demons sold 250,000 copies in Australia alone, but, she says dryly, “Nobody noticed because it was children’s literature.”

 Her three children (one of whom is also a novelist) helped her imagination develop but she had no idea that anyone would be interested in what she wrote when she finished Across the Nightingale Floor. The pseudonym came about simply because she wanted to start again without being pigeonholed.

“I wanted to write without any brakes on, without making any concession to the child reader,” she admits. “In that time, girls were adults at 15 and boys at 16, they were old by 30 and dead at 40.

“I was just writing what I passionately adored. To most, my passion for Japanese culture seemed very eccentric, and I had no idea anyone would ever read it,” she says. Success has helped buy a house overlooking the sea, and increased her confidence as a writer but is clearly not central to her life as writing is. Her website, www.lianhearn.com, gives some idea of the density and multi-layered quality of her imagination, and of the world-wide admiration which her novels have garnered.

Hearn loathes novels like Memoirs of a Geisha, and is “extremely careful” about not appropriating other cultures, which she says would be all too easy to do. Perhaps one of the reasons why Tales of the Otori is so resonant is because of the myths she has invented; she deliberately avoided words such as “samurai” or “geisha”. She clearly loves and reveres Japanese culture and its people.

“They’ve had very bad press all over the world, but I find Japan fantasic – safe, clean, friendly, optimistic. Japan was never colonised, it’s one of the few Asian countries which met and fought the West on its own terms, which I think is why it has been so demonised.”

Not, I suspect, by Hearn’s readers.

ends
The Harsh Cry of the Heron has just been published by Macmillan.