Interview with writer Alan Gratz
by Aline Pereira*

Born and raised in Tennessee, Alan Gratz has a college Scholars degree with a specialization in creative writing and a Master's degree in English education from the University of Tennessee. In addition to writing plays, magazine articles and a few TV episodes of the series City Confidential, Alan has taught catapult-building to middle-schoolers, written more than 6,000 radio commercials, sold other people's books, lectured at a Czech university, and traveled the galaxy as a space ranger (one of those is not true).

Samurai Shortstop (Dial, 2006) is his first book. He is also the author of the forthcoming Something Rotten (Dial 2007), a contemporary young adult murder mystery based on "Hamlet," its sequel, Something Wicked (Dial 2008), and a middle grade baseball novel tentatively-titled The Brooklyn Nine (Dial 2009). To date, Samurai Shortstop has been listed among the 2007 Bank Street Best Books of the Year, the YALSA 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, the 2006 Washington Post Top Ten Books for Children, and the CCBC Choices 2007 Best-of-the-Year.
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Your first book, Samurai Shortstop has justifiably received a lot of praise and accolades. How did you come up with the idea of combining "bushido" (the samurai code of conduct) and baseball? (For those who haven't read the book yet, here's a blurb: in an elite Tokyo boarding school at the end of the nineteenth century, a samurai's son tries to show his father that it is possible to combine the samurai warrior code with the game of baseball).

I was wistfully reading a travel guide to Japan when I discovered a photo of a kimono-clad man throwing out the first pitch at a Japanese high school baseball tournament in 1915. I had always assumed that American G.I.s brought baseball with them during the Allied Occupation of Japan after World War II, but more research revealed baseball was brought to Japan far earlier by American sailors in the 1860s. I started reading book after book about Japanese history. One thing led to another - baseball, bushido, the Meiji Restoration, the historical tension between East and West - and Samurai Shortstop was born. I suppose from the start I saw a parallel between the baseball bat and the samurai sword - helped in part by a picture I found of Japanese baseball home run king Sadaharu Oh training with a samurai sword during his playing days. It was probably nothing more than a publicity stunt, but I loved the connection between traditional martial arts and modern team sports.

Sixteen year-old Toyo's family is part of the samurai warrior tradition, whose rigid code of conduct was founded on the principle of giving up life before death or dishonor... The samurai, or Japanese feudal warriors, existed in a hierarchical and conformist culture that rewarded obedience and loyalty over individuality. The Japan Toyo knows, however, is on the brink of modernization and the samurai face the demise of their class and status... How does Toyo go about reconciling his family's "code of conduct" with his great interest in baseball, which represented all that the samurai fought against? Was there a place after all, for the samurai philosophy in times of social change?

Wow... that's a big question! How Toyo reconciles an ancient warrior code and the modern world is the heart of what Samurai Shortstop is all about, and I hate to give away how he does it for those who haven't read the book. I will say that I took the work of Japanese scholar and statesman Nitobe Inazo very much to heart while writing this book. In 1905 Nitobe wrote an incredibly influential book called Bushido: The Soul of Japan. In it, he gave a first-hand account of the Meiji Era's rapid adoption of everything "Western," and worried that without some connection to its past Japan would quickly cease to have its own cultural identity. His idea was to take bushido - the samurai way of the warrior - and preserve its virtues as the core of Japanese ethics. By taking the best aspects of the samurai (rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, sincerity, honor, loyalty and self-control), he believed that the Japanese could maintain their sense of identity while still conquering this new world of Western thought and technology. It was a fabulously successful idea in Japan, and was put into practical use almost immediately.

Not coincidentally, this is the same decision that Toyo comes to in the book. He begins his samurai training with his father only to discover that the samurai were not exactly the noble, idealized warriors of Japanese nostalgia. Though the truth was far more complex and hairy, Toyo does immediately recognize the strengths of bushido's ideals, and thus separates the idea of the samurai class from the idea of bushido. This is essentially the same distinction the Japanese were forced to make during the turbulent years following the Meiji Restoration: the preservation of bushido without the preservation of the samurai class structure.

In short, yes, both Toyo and the Japanese people found a way to  preserve the ideals of bushido in the face of modern progress. If they hadn't, as Nitobe argued, they would have lost their souls.

Samurai Shortstop is set in 19th century Japan, but it speaks to our times. What sort of feedback have you been getting from teens?

The most interesting teen feedback I've ever gotten came from what was to me the most unlikely of sources: a 13-year-old girl from Blytheville, Arkansas. While I was on a visit to her school she handed me a letter that told me that the character she most identified with in Samurai Shortstop was not the protagonist or his playful best friend, but the soft-spoken former sumo wrestler Fujimura. Fuji is one of the few students at Ichiko who is not from a samurai family, and he feels very humbled to be included at such a prestigious institution. His family is also very poor, and he can only afford to go to Ichiko because his farm village has collectively raised the money to send him there. Thus, unlike many of the other boys, he takes his studies and his place at Ichiko very seriously. In the letter, the girl told me that she would be the first child in her family ever to attend college, and as an eighth-grader she already felt the great weight of that expectation and responsibility. Fuji was a character she sympathized with immediately despite the gulf between their eras and worlds, and I like to think there are many more characters and situations in the book that have just as much relevance to teenagers today as they did to Japanese students one hundred years ago.

What triggered your interest in Japan and Japanese culture? What was the research process for the book like?

I initially hadn't intended to write a book about Japan. I was actively writing for young adults at the time (though I'd yet to sell a book) and really just began reading about Japan for my own edification. I can't really say how or why I became so fascinated with Japanese history and culture, but for a time it completely consumed me. I suppose it began when I read James Clavell's Shogun and Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, and I didn't stop there. I read novels, histories, travel guides, manga - anything and everything I could get my hands on. That's how I stumbled across the picture I mentioned earlier, and how I began to learn more about the origins of Japanese baseball. When I read about an international incident caused by a fight at a Japanese high school baseball game in the 1890s, I knew I had to turn the whole thing into a book.

After that, I went back and reread the non-fiction I'd read for fun, and this time took notes. All in all, I think I read more than 30 books on Japanese history, culture, language, education - anything I thought might be useful. As an American (and a culturally isolated Southerner at that!), I knew there was no way I could ever know everything there was to know about Japanese culture, but I absorbed as much as I could and set out to write a book about a time and place I'd never been to. Looking back at it now, I can't believe I ever had the courage to do it!

What made you choose young adults as your target readers and historical fiction as your genre?

Samurai Shortstop was the third novel I wrote for young adults, but the first one that I sold. The other two (one a contemporary super-hero fantasy and the other a romantic high school comedy) still haven't sold, although I'm reworking the comedy and hope to place it one day. I had been trying to find my place as a writer for some time, having written, as you mention in the introduction, for a number of different media. Then my wife became the book and toy buyer for a chain of independent bookstores and she began bringing home books like Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. These books and more excited me, and I quickly realized that I wanted to be a part of the new young adult renaissance. As for historical fiction - that's just the story I wanted to tell, and fortunately for me, it's one an editor wanted to publish. Not everything I write will be historical fiction but I do have another historical baseball novel on the way in 2009; and I'm sure I'll return to the world of old Japan some day as well.

How does the American YA literary scene look nowadays, from where you stand?

I think it's enjoying a renaissance, as I said. I think there are more terrific choices out there for young readers than ever before, in every kind of genre imaginable. Toda's young adult novels don't neglect the "adult" part of that equation the way I feel many books from previous generations do. Today's kids are smarter, more worldly, and more engaged than ever before, and they have shelves full of books written just for them to satisfy any and every interest they might have. It's a great time to be a young adult writer, and an even better time to be a young adult reader.

The audience for this book seems to be primarily male teens. Did you set out to write a novel for boys? Have you had much feedback from adults who have enjoyed the book?

While I do hope that girls find the book as intriguing as boys, yes, I did consider boys my primary audience when writing Samurai. Boys are notoriously reluctant readers and I wanted to write something that was both engaging and meaningful at the same time. With that in mind, I tried to make sure there was always something happening in Samurai Shortstop. I still explored deeper concepts and themes, but I wrapped them in action that I hoped would keep any reader from putting the book down.

Most adults who have read Samurai have been reviewers; and I've been lucky in that it has been almost universally praised. As with any young adult novel, I do hope there's enough in there to appeal to the "adult" side of that equation. Still, I often find a great resistance to young adult literature among adults not in the business. There's a perception that such books are just "kids stuff," perhaps on the level of an "After School Special," all problem novel and no art or subtlety or fun. Sometimes this prejudice is couched in the questions I get from well-meaning adults, like, "So, do you ever think you'll move up to adult books?" I gently remind these people that young adult fiction is a thriving, competitive, and exciting market, and that I'm very happy to be where I am. At no point did I ever consider writing books for children to be a "stepping stone" to writing books for adults. This was the goal, and I'm proud to have made it. Even so, I still get comments like the one from an old college roommate, whose response to my announcement that Samurai Shortstop had been published was, "Don't worry, publishing a young adult book is almost like having a real book published." Things like that are very frustrating.

Having started our blog recently, we at PaperTigers are finding that blogging almost feels like learning a new language. You have a blog too, and I read somewhere your referring to blogging as a "writing genre." Can you say a little more about this?

I think the expectation of many editors and publicity folks is that writing a blog entry every day takes no time and has lots of rewards. But writing a good blog, one that readers return to day in and day out, takes a monumental amount of work. Creating content that is entertaining and/or educational takes just as much planning as writing fiction, and I simply don't have that kind of time.

Some people use their blogs as online diaries, and it's a great medium for that. But I've never been able to sustain the momentum required to write about my daily or weekly life, so that option was out for me as well. Still, I wanted to have a blog to keep readers up to date on what was happening with me, so I started a blog called "What's the Rumpus" before Samurai Shortstop ever came out and tried to find things to write about every few days.

At first I thought my audience was going to be my young adult readership, but I quickly learned that it wasn't. Teens aren't interested in my daily life. I think only the rare young adult author like Meg Cabot (who really does seem to live the lifestyle she writes about in her books) has a life that is interesting to her readers. Instead, I find my blog is read more by educators, reviewers, editors and other authors. With that in mind, I tried to focus on my writing life, but quickly found that what I was really doing wasn't blogging but "flogging" - hyping my own "product" without much other content. After some thought, I revamped my approach and joined forces with my wife's crafting blog to focus collectively on our efforts to live creative, productive lives. The result is Gratz Industries, and I think it's been relatively successful.

Associate Professor at the Roosevelt University in Chicago, Tom Philion's research blog, The Age of ___? offers a very interesting exploration of the relationship between young adult literature and the contemporary world, including a review of your book and other thought-provoking comments inspired by it. All this to say that, in a comment to one of his posts, you mentioned that Samurai Shortstop was a breakthrough for you, both as an author and as a writer. How do you differentiate the two?

I meant "author" as profession and "writer" as craftsperson. Writing historical fiction (which was new to me) forced me to learn new ways to organize and outline my work. I had hundreds of pages of notes to keep track of after all! My writing grew by leaps and bounds during the development of Samurai Shortstop, and thus I think of it as a real breakthrough for me in terms of craft. And of course to sell the book meant establishing myself professionally - what I would call a breakthrough as an "author."

What other YA books would you recommend for a teen who loved Samurai Shortstop? Any recommendations that particularly fit our Pacific Rim and South Asian focus?

The mysteries of Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, beginning with The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn, are great novels set in 18th century Japan. Lensey Namioka also has a series of samurai mysteries, these set in 16th century Japan and beginning with The Samurai and the Long-Nosed Devils. Eric Haugaard's The Samurai's Tale is another great novel set in the golden age of the samurai, as are Katherine Paterson's The Master Puppeteer and The Sign of the Chrysanthemum. While not set in Japan, Graham Salisbury has also written some great young adult novels about Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii. And across the Sea of Japan there are Linda Sue Park's novels of ancient Korea, including The Kite Fighters, When My Name was Keoko (set during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the prelude to World War II), and the Newbery-winning A Single Shard. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head!

I understand you will be showing your love of baseball in another book, soon? Please do tell us about this and any other upcoming projects.

The Brooklyn Nine (due in 2009) is the next baseball book, and it will chronicle nine "innings," or generations, of an immigrant American family from the 1830s to the present through their ongoing connections to baseball. It's turning into quite a monumental project! Coming up before that though is Something Rotten, which is Hamlet rewritten as a contemporary YA murder mystery set in fictional Denmark, Tennessee. I'm really excited about this book, and I've already sold the sequel, Something Wicked, which is Macbeth recast as a murder mystery but with the same snarky seventeen-year-old detective. Something Rotten is due out October of 2007, and Something Wicked will follow most likely in fall of 2008.

*Aline Pereira is PaperTigers Managing Editor

Posted July 2007

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