The Sentence Is Death

She was born in Tokyo in 1963, an only child. Her father was a banker who was transferred to New York when she was nine and that was where she was brought up. In 1986, she graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and shortly afterwards published her first novel, A Multitude of Gods, ‘a story of female submission and religious patriarchy set during the Kamakura period in Japan’. It catapulted her to international acclaim and received rave reviews, although the feature film adaptation starring Meryl Streep did less well. Among her other books, the best known were: The Temizu Basin, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima and My Father Never Knew Me, a semi-autobiographical memoir of her early days in America. She had also published two volumes of poetry, the most recent of which had come out earlier in the year. It was called Two Hundred Haikus and contained exactly that. She had famously said that it could take her several years to write a novel because she treated every word not just as a stitch in a tapestry but as a tapestry in itself. I’m not entirely sure what she meant by that either.

She married the English cinematographer Marcus Brandt, who had worked on her film, and this was what had brought her to London where she now lived. It was an abusive relationship – described over nine pages in the Sunday Times Magazine and later in a BBC Imagine documentary – and it had come to an end in 2008. There were no children. Two years later, in 2010, much to the surprise of many newspaper pundits, she had married the property developer Adrian Lockwood.

At some stage in her life she had embraced Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, and this was reflected in much of her work, particularly her belief in animism, the idea that inanimate objects contain some sort of spirituality, although as far as I could tell she wasn’t known to visit shrines or, for that matter, to indulge in ritual dance. She also explored the nature of otherness, her own dual ethnicity and the disconnection that came from living in a culture separated from that in which she had been born. I’m quoting here from the flap of one of her books.

I had been introduced to her in the yurt, the Mongolian-style writers’ tent they put up every year at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s not huge but it’s a quiet place to hang out and they serve coffee and snacks all day, with malt whisky in the evening – if they haven’t already packed you off home. I was in Edinburgh to talk about my children’s books. She was doing a poetry recital. I was sitting on my own when she arrived as part of a melee that included her publisher, her agent, her publicist, two journalists, a photographer and the director of the festival. For some reason she was wearing a man’s three-piece suit, complete with bowler hat. Apart from a silver brooch – possibly a letter from the Japanese alphabet – pinned to her shoulder, she could have stepped out of a painting by Magritte.

There was hardly anyone else in the tent and after Akira had accepted a cup of green tea and refused a rather tired egg and cress sandwich, somebody noticed I was there and introduced me as the author of the Alex Rider series.

‘Oh yes?’

Those were her first two words to me and I will never forget them – nor the handshake that followed. It was utterly indifferent, over in an instant.

I muttered something about admiring her work, which wasn’t true but was something I felt I ought to say.

‘Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you.’ If each word was a tapestry, it had been spun out of razor wire.

She was already doing that awful thing of looking over my shoulder to see if there was anyone more interesting in the yurt. When she established that there wasn’t, she turned her back on me to check something with her publicist and a moment later the entire group ebbed away.

I wasn’t exactly put out although I did think it was strange. The atmosphere at book festivals is nearly always friendly and non-competitive and it’s rare to meet an author who grandstands. I gave Akira the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was nervous about her session. I’m the same. No matter how often I speak in public, I’m uneasy before I go onstage and find it hard to make conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m just rude.

But when I met her a few months later at the book launch, she snubbed me again and this time I was sure it was quite deliberate. She seemed to have no memory of having met me before and the moment she was told (again) that I was a children’s author, she switched off. It really was as if a light had gone out in her eyes. By now she had started affecting those Yoko Ono-style tinted glasses. I thought she was rather ridiculous.