Why Japanese? (And Roman...And Norse)

I love fantasy. I love dwarves and elves and dragons. I love kings and knights. I love representations of feudal Europe and the Catholic Church. My favorite book series are The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. As a simple glance at the earnings and popularity of the visual adaptations can attest, many people agree that they are very, very good. In my mind, they have become the definitive fantasy versions of what they contain.

When I pick up a new fantasy book that has dragons and knights, I inevitably compare them to these definitive versions. Let’s call it a vice. I do the same with any new versions of cinematic Batman. To my mind, The Dark Knight trilogy is the definitive version, and anything else is an impostor. I’m finding more and more that regardless of how well a medieval fantasy is written, they always lack the wonder I long for. It feels like I’ve been there before.

When I set out on my journey to create my own world, I wanted a breath of fresh air. I thought of several possibilities for inspiration, such as Greco-Roman, Indian, Chinese and of course, Japanese. After much deliberation and fiddling, my love for Japan won out.

Japan had everything I was looking for. A unique political system that was both different and familiar to a Western audience. An influence on North American pop culture in the form of samurai and ninja’s. And a fascinating integrated belief system that allows for new ways to understand and explore life. And most of all, while there are certainly many wonderful examples of Japanese culture used in Western stories, I feel that there has yet to be a definitive high fantasy inspired by it.

As the ideas gained clarity, some of the other cultures I had considered crawled their way back into the picture. The classic concept of Rome vs Eastern empires remained firm in my mind, and when crafting a world where both could co-exist naturally, Nordic cultures reemerged as well.

The end result is a world that is strongly based on Japanese culture, but has natural give-and-take with the other cultures to form something else entirely. The Odicians (Roman) have a touch of Japanese. The Ainoens (Japanese) have a touch of Roman. They do not feel like two worlds being forced into one, but a single world with believable social and economic flow based on a shared history.