I’m sure, if you’ve read this story, you’ve seen the deep ties that this story has with Japan.  That wasn’t a coincidence… for some reason.  I mean, Lily is half Japanese.  Her mother is Japanese.  She is learning Japanese.  At the end (spoiler) she is living in Japan.  She makes several trips to Japan, and Japan is always going to be very close to her heart.

There was something interesting that happened with the Lily story as it progressed.  I started with the express intention of creating a character that was as unlike me as possible.  She is a (reasonably beautiful) teenage girl.  I’m a middle-aged guy pushing fifty.  She’s outgoing, friendly and extroverted.  I’m, well… none of those things, really.  She’s almost literally everything I’m not, and I did that on purpose.  There are multiple reasons for that, but I think one of the major reasons was that of the many reasons I created her, one of the most important was that I wanted a character through which I could work some stuff out in my own life.

Specifically, I wanted to understand why the life of a character such as Lily’s is so appealing to me on a visceral level.  It’s not so much that I want to live it, because I’m nothing if not practical and there is absolutely no way that is possible.  (You’ll hear a bunch of people tell you it is, if you just identify as it.  That is a lie).  It’s more that there’s something about it that is strongly attractive to me and I needed to find out why so I could work through it.

The same thing is true for Japan, in my life.  There has always been, but lately even moreso, something that is strongly attractive to me about it.  And Lily also ended up being an avenue to explore that as well.

As I continued to write the story, I failed utterly at my original goal.  I found Lily’s and my personality converging in some ways.  Clearly not in all ways, but she started to be into more of the things I am, and I found that voicing her personality subtly changed mine as well.  It’s not like I became her, because clearly I didn’t, but she was always this quiet presence in my head, and sometimes I’d think to myself “I wonder how Lily would react to this”, and she’d kinda tell me.  Not in voices, no, but just in… presence, in a sense.  I created a character so well that in some ways she might as well exist.

Maybe put another way, I know Lily better than anyone else on this planet, because I made her, and she’s a part of me.

As I continued the story, some weird stuff happened.  For example, there were a few story arcs where she went somewhere.  Like, for example, the first time she went to Japan.  If you look at the times (not the dates, but the times) that I wrote the story, you’ll see that they were actually written (or at least dated) for the times that the actual events would have been happening.  I did research.  I knew when she would be at the airport, I knew which flights she was taking, I knew how long they would take, I knew when it took off, I knew when it landed.  I knew absolutely everything about her journey.  I knew what the weather was like in Japan, I researched train lines, I even kept track of which hotel she might have stayed at and where.  I knew as much as was humanly possible about her journey.  And I found myself genuinely excited for her.  I was thinking things like “Lily is in the air now”, “Lily is in Saitama right now”…  “Lily’s in ookunoshima petting the bunnies”… and as she was doing all those things, it was so much like I was, even though I was sitting in my house working or doing whatever.  I was even kind of disappointed when the arc ended, even though I knew that I was running out of material and she needed to go home.  There were times when I loved writing the story because Lily was loving what she was doing and Lily is a part of me.

So I took some of my (inexplicable, and frankly sometimes undeserved) love of Japan, and gave it to Lily, and she loves Japan too.

I wrote this story with the intent of learning about myself, and I guess I did, but I put a lot of myself into the story too.

But here’s the interesting thing:  I’m not Lily.  I was very clear about that from the very beginning.  I created Lily, I know Lily, Lily is in some ways like a daughter to me, but I’m not her.  I’ve never considered myself her, even when I was looking into way to voice her and bring her to life.  She’s always been her own person.  She loves Japan because she’s half Japanese, and it’s part of her heritage.  Her birth mother (Emiko) is from Japan, she has family there, she has friends there, she has sisters (adopted, but still) there.  She’s not like me – a nearly fifty year old white as they come Otaku/weeb adjacent (I refuse to identify as either of those because it’s a lot deeper than that for me).  It’s family for her.

Lily has her reasons for loving Japan, but at the end of the day, maybe she’s not as different from me as I was trying to make her at the beginning.

And I guess that’s fine.  The long and short is – there’s a part of me that’s living in Japan right now and living her best life, even if only in my imagination.

More as a reminder to me than a promise:  Next post:  Sabby.