Last time, I wrote about writing a novel with two authors, this time it is about the unusual way the first scene of our book was born some 8 years ago.
Yakushima has a breathtaking nature with 7000 year old cedar trees of which you can only wonder what they have already seen in their life. However, having underestimated this hiking tour in length, difficulty, required equipment and necessary food supplies, the exhaustion had Yoji and me already tight in its grip. After roughly 12 hours steep hike, we longed for a warm and cozy hut with some food and sleep to recover, but what we got instead was a strong taifun that caught us by surprise at night, while we had no shelter to hide from it. Wind and rain made it so cold that not even a short rest was an option at that point.
Not going into detail about how we overcame the ordeals, we finally reached civilisation after 3 days in the mountains, including hungering, thirsting, freezing and almost having had a fatal accident at the rocky cliffs of this Japanese island. I cannot describe how grateful we were for the tiniest bit of cheese we got and the hut on the camp ground we were allowed to stay in.
Ripped from everyday life by this extreme experience, creativity swept over us and in the moonlight shining through a window into the hut, we role-played the key scene of our first book, incl. the conversation, the mimic and gestures, the lighting, the flow. And on the ferry back to the mainland, we then put it into words. The hour of birth for our stories, but also the beginning of a long slumber.
Next time more about why our stories lay dormant for 8 years and how they got revived.
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