Tantalizing excerpts from the novel’s extras, we know you will enjoy! Here translator Adrienne Carey Hurley interviews the award-winning Japanese author Tomoyuki Hoshino. This is his first book to be published in English.
On writing Lonely Hearts Killer:
“After
writing Lonely Hearts Killer, I was asked the following by my students
and young writers. ‘We don’t understand why you’d want to problematize
the emperor. Is the emperor really that big of a presence in the lives
of people over thirty?’ I felt the same way when I was younger. But then
I wondered what would happen to the people of Japan if right here and
right now the emperor system were abolished?”
“I feel like
Japanese and American societies, and our entire world today for that
matter, have gone mad. When the majority is overtaken by madness, it
becomes all the more difficult to explain what madness is or how it
manifests. For that reason I turned to the novel as a venue for trying
to make the madness visible.”
