As I mentioned in my review last week, I was blown away by the realistic characters and vivid descriptions in Jennifer Epstein’s The Gods of Heavenly Punishment. I’m therefore particularly thrilled to have Jennifer join us at Doing Dewey today for an interview and a giveaway. Read on to learn more about the inspiration and research that led up to this fantastic novel.
Hi Jennifer! Thanks for agreeing to do an interview at Doing Dewey today. Could you please start by telling us a bit about your book, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment?
Sure. The novel is set against the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo by the U.S., but it is really a look at the way the Pacific War affected men and women on both sides of the conflict. It’s therefore written from multiple perspectives—we follow a young American growing up in Tokyo, his father, an American architect (based on the real-life architect Antonin Raymond), a Japanese woman in a troubled marriage, her daughter, and an American bomber pilot and his wife. Each of these characters has his or her own individual storyline, but as you read you begin to understand how—in the book as in real life—each one is impacting the lives and futures of the other characters, in ways that are both subtle and profound.
What inspired you to write about the firebombing of Tokyo?
I’d wanted to write about Japan for some time, having lived there for much of my 20’s. But I’d never really found a subject or story I felt drawn to, and so I kept writing about other places (my first novel, The Painter from Shanghai, was set in China, for instance). Then my husband Michael came home one night after having spoken to a military lawyer about a war crime in Iraq he is making a film about. “What do you know about the firebombing of Tokyo?” he asked (apparently this was brought up as an example of past war crimes that were never really defined as such). To my chagrin, I realized I didn’t know very much at all. In fact, I had to go look it up online—and was astounded to realize that the firebombing was, in its initial scope at least, even more devastating than Hiroshima or Nagasaki—100,000 civilians were simply incinerated. And yet, when people talk or think about the great battles and bombings of World War II, it never comes up. I realized I wanted to fill in that gap in knowledge for myself, and in the process really try to explore the moral and emotional nuances of the Pacific War itself.
I loved that you included so many different perspectives in your book. It made me feel empathy for people on both sides of the war as well as horror at the terrible actions both sides took. What led you to tell your story in this way? Did you initially plant to have so many different perspectives?
I actually didn’t—I was going to tell the story from just one perspective, that of 15-year-old Yoshi Kobayashi. But as I got deeper and deeper into my research I kept coming across other stories I really wanted to try to tell—that of the 1943 Doolittle Raid (the firebombing’s precursor—an extraordinary story), and that of a respected American architect who dedicates much of his career to building in Tokyo, but when the war starts then cooperates with the U.S. Army Air Corps to bomb it to smithereens. Sort of on a whim, I began writing out those pieces—and realized I really liked the way that using more than one perspective gave a much more complex and far less subjective perspective to the war than one usually reads. The challenge, of course, was to try to bring all the stories together—but in the end I think I managed it!
Is there a particular message you’d like your readers to take away from your book?
For me, the lesson learned in writing it was that war is never simply a matter of “right” or “wrong,” “us” or “them,” or even “victor” and “vanquished.” It’s much muddier, messier and irrevocably damaging than that, on both sides of any conflict. In the end everyone commits wrongs, and everyone suffers losses—often incalculable ones that will resound for generations.
As someone who loves non-fiction, I always like to hear how historical fiction is rooted in reality. What kind of research did you do while you were writing your book?
A lot! I’m a bit of a research addict, and I must have read dozens of books and visited hundreds of websites. My favorite parts of researching, though, were the experiential ones—like climbing around in a B-25 bomber to get a sense of what it might have felt like, or hearing the roar of 16 of them revving their engines in tribute to the original raiders (as was done at one of the Doolittle Raid Reunions I attended). I also had some incredible interviews with Japanese women who had survived the bombing and were able to be very candid about what the experience was like for them.
About the Author
Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of The Gods of Heavenly Punishment and the international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, Self, Mademoiselle and NBC, and has worked in Hong Kong, Japan and Bangkok, Thailand. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, two daughters and especially needy Springer Spaniel.
For more information, please visit Jennifer Cody Epstein’s website and blog. You can also find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter.
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