Eroshenko follows a blind Ukrainian Esperantist and writer who moves to Tokyo, where he winds up at the center of early 20th-century Tokyo’s anarchist, feminist, and literary circles. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

For years I kept coming across references to Vasily Eroshenko in Japanese art and literature–seeing his portrait in the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, his photo in the Nakamuraya restaurant, reading about him in novels by famous writers like Kawabata Yasunari and Hirabayashi Taiko. Then a few years ago, I discovered that he had been close friends with Kamichika Ichiko, who has her own wild story of a love triangle with feminist Ito Noe and anarchist Osugi Sakae. I just knew I had to bring these two stories together. About a year after I got the inspiration and started planning the novel, the first translation of some of Eroshenko’s short stories was published under the title The Narrow Cage. In the introduction, the translator, Adam Kuplowski, briefly summarizes Eroshenko’s biography. Several reviewers mentioned that Eroshenko’s life was worthy of a novel. I agreed–I was already working on one.

It was a bit intimidating to write about real people. I wasn’t sure if I had enough material at first. But I discovered that many of Eroshenko’s friends published autobiographies: Kamichika Ichiko, Soma Kokko, Akita Ujaku and others. There was also a biography of Eroshenko published after his death, and the author, Takasugi Ichiro, had interviewed Ichiko, Akita and others who knew him. Some of Eroshenko’s letters and speeches have also been published along with his short stories. Once I realized there was a lot of material, it was more a matter of fitting it together into a narrative and making decisions about personality and motivations.

As much as possible, I used real events and incidents. Every named character is a real person. Ito Noe really did let her baby pee off the verandah in the Bluestocking editorial office, which was just a room in Hiratsuka Raicho’s parents’ house. The other women editors complained about Noe, but it shows how little she cared about propriety. I also used Eroshenko’s and Ichiko’s own words as much as I could, especially when they deliver public speeches.

In some ways, I think of Eroshenko as a companion to my previous novel, Flowers by Night, which is set in Japan about a hundred years earlier. In Flowers by Night, the main character, Ichi, belongs to the guild of blind men, the Todoza, which provided training and a job, and was run by blind people themselves. That history of self-determination and independence of blind communities in Japan explains why Eroshenko found the situation there superior to Moscow and even London. Both novels also show how the gay-straight binary did not exist in Japan until they imported Western-style homophobia in the early twentieth century

What are some things that you find interesting about the human condition that you think makes for great fiction?

I’m very interested in finding states of being that are very unlike our own and making them relatable. What did it feel like to walk down the street in Tokyo in 1915? So much of the outward details are so different, but on the inside we’re all just people. I love being transported to a different time and place but still recognizing that essential humanity.

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

Even though the story is set in 1915-1916, it’s both inspiring and chilling how many parallels there are with today. The characters are activists for socialism, anarchism, sexual freedom, disability rights, queer identity, women’s rights, birth control and abortion, all things we are still struggling with more than a century later. The real people behind these characters were incredibly brave to protest publicly despite censorship, government repression, and police brutality. At the same time, they made a lot of mistakes, like letting ego and petty jealousy sabotage the movement. The toxic rivalry between Sakai Toshihiko and Osugi Sakae over who would be the leader of the socialist movement in Japan is unfortunately a common story in leftist organizing.

The feminist struggles also feel very relevant to me: Ito Noe trying to manage a career and children; Kamichika Ichiko thinking of herself as sexually liberated, but still finding herself bound by the conventions and sexism around her; men like Osugi Sakae proclaiming themselves feminist allies, then treating the real women in their lives very badly.

Above all, I wanted to depict the struggle for self-determination that was happening in the blind community at that time. Many of the things that Eroshenko said were decades ahead of his time in terms of disability rights. In particular, his comment that the problem was not blindness itself, but the fact that blind people were not taught to live independently nor hired in jobs that would allow them to support themselves. This prefigures the social model of disability by around 50 years. Eroshenko’s imagined solution was to create self-sufficient communes of blind people, which also prefigures by almost a century ideas about disabled people as a class being created by capitalism. I felt it was important to tell his story not only for his remarkable life as an individual, but to challenge the way disability is often represented in literature. Too often, the character with a disability is a lone individual, but in real life, community is essential. Eroshenko’s travels were facilitated through international networks of blind schools, and he dedicated his life to teaching and to publishing in Braille. It was important to me to represent his friendships with other blind people in Japan.

Eroshenko’s life was very hard, full of struggle. But it’s also important to remember people who spoke out against fascism and for peace and equality even in the face of tremendous odds.

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