The Fanny Upping follows a Japanese girl living in a multi-dimensional mayhem who is trying to unravel everything that has turned upside down and backward in the world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

As you say, I wanted to paint a world upside-down. Driving the story is what’s called the colloquium—where participants, always unwilling, learn a life lesson. For those that survive, it’s a valuable learning experience—though the unhuman entity that runs this colloquium seems indifferent to the fate of its participants. This story is just a natural growth from the first novel, The Cuckoo Colloquium, though I write the novels so that they can all stand alone.

What were the morals you were trying to capture while creating your characters?

Evenhandedness. Justness. What goes around comes around. The colloquium can be a harsh and unforgiving mentor. Self-indulgence will be corrected. Those who think themselves superior, or in some way better, will find themselves on the wrong, maybe fatal, end. It probably all comes down to the fundamental scruple of doing the right thing.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Coming of age is a big theme, of course, as we follow the maturity of Pinky Bell from gangly little girl into womanhood. But it’s also about honesty and being true to oneself. The stories look at what it means to assimilate into another culture, too, and play with the highs and lows of this exacting process. I hope the themes stray from mainstream novels and challenge social norms in ways that readers don’t usually get.

Will there be a follow-up novel to this story? If so, what aspects of the story will the next book cover?

No follow-up planned, but the themes and messages will continue into my next book called 33 Frivolous Pricks (out in June 2024) that returns to the theme of time travel and the human toll one inevitably must pay for the experience. The story, like most of what I write, is set in Kyoto and Los Angeles, two cities I know well. Like The Fanny Upping, 33 Frivolous Pricks is a wild ride, and I just hope readers are able to hang on and enjoy it until the end.

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