It's over five years since the publication of the first book Across the Nightingale Floor (2002). Since then the Tales of the Otori have been sold into 36 countries and have been world wide best sellers.

Film rights were sold before the first book was published to Universal Studios for Kennedy/Marshall. David Henry Hwang was assigned as script writer and the script is now in development.

The fifth and final book, Heaven's Net is Wide is now available. It goes back in time to relate the life of Lord Shigeru from the age of 12 (the year in which Takeo is born). Many of the subjects that are only hinted at in Across the Nightingale Floor - Shigeru's training with Matsuda Shingen, his first encounter with Iida Sadamu, the battle of Yaegahara, the role of Muto Shizuka, the meeting with Lady Maruyama - are narrated in full here, as well as a few other unexpected events. Heaven's Net is Wide finishes just before Across the Nightingale Floor begins, so the series has a circular shape. (You can go on reading it forever!)  

I started writing Across the Nightingale Floor with the four main characters in my head and the opening sentence in Takeo’s voice. I was in Akiyoshidai International Arts Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture; it was a damp, humid afternoon in September. The light was pale and opalescent. Water trickled from the pools around the artists’ residence, carp splashed and occasionally a kingfisher swooped above the pool. I was writing in a notebook with a black gel pen I’d bought in Himeji. I wrote ‘My mother used to threaten to tear me limb from limb.’ Later I changed this to ‘into eight pieces’. I like to occasionally use Japanese idioms translated literally to give the feeling that the book is not written in English...

"Peace comes at the price of bloodshed." This is part of a prophecy made in Grass For His Pillow. "Five battles will buy you peace, four to win and one to lose." The tension in my work is always between humans’ drive to power and their desire for peace.

My hero, Takeo, is born into a peaceful non-violent sect who follow the teaching that it is forbidden to take life, your own or any one else’s. But when his family is massacred and his village destroyed by a warlord, Takeo’s immediate instinct is for revenge...