Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction for children and adults has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee, Room, The Kyoto Journal and Cicada, among others. She is a recipient of a We Need Diverse Books Mentorship, and was a finalist for the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. Catfish Rolling is her debut novel.
Hi Clara! Thank you so much for joining us here at Young Adulting today. We’re so excited to have you! Your recently released debut novel Catfish Rolling is a YA coming-of-age tale about family, memory, and an earthquake. What drew you to writing for younger audiences?
I write different genres for adults as well as young people, but I always knew that this novel would be YA. I think that teenage years are full of change, conflict, and learning—all very rich areas for story and character. I’m quite character-driven, so having characters that are learning about themselves and the world around them can really lead a story for me. The books I read as a teenager were very significant and inspirational to me, and it’s particularly important to me that I have diverse characters in my writing, because that’s really what I wanted (and didn’t see) in the books I read when I was younger.
I love folklore and mythology, and when I learned Catfish Rolling draws from Japanese myths and legends, I was beyond excited! Can you tell us a bit about your worldbuilding process? Did you have specific legends or myths you drew from?
The catfish story is of course the folklore I drew on the most, though there are also some figures such as the kitsune and tanuki that appear in the book. There are lots of different stories about them, mostly featuring them as tricksters—sometimes benevolent, sometimes not. There are a lot of different yokai in Japanese folklore, and they are seen as both superstitions and sort of real at the same time. Tono Monogatari or The Legends of Tono is an old book of folklore collected by Kunio Yanagita, with many of the stories told to him by Kizen Sasaki, and those provided me with a lot if inspiration.
Catfish Rolling tackles heavy themes of grief and natural disaster with fiction. Here, myth and legend seem to help make sense of the hardships young audiences may encounter in real life. Can you tell us about what inspired you to tell this story through the lens of magical realism?
I think one of the most magical parts of the novel is the time breakage, which came when I learned that the 2011 earthquake was so big that it shifted the earth on its axis so that it spins faster—and as a result our day is a tiny bit shorter. (1.8 microseconds, to be exact.) It also caused Honshu (the main island of Japan) to actually move more than 6ft east, closer to the North American continent. That actually seems like science fiction to me, even though it’s real. So my idea of time breaking came from there, and on a bigger level it also fit in with being caught in the past or painful events that Sora can’t help but relive. Using magical realism allowed those memories and traumas to become a physical place, which I think made it more tangible and real.
What is your favourite part of the writing process?
Finishing a draft! It’s the purest form of accomplishment that I know—and because I do many drafts the nice thing is I can experience that multiple times in the process of writing.
Are there any memorable words of encouragement that have stuck with you throughout the publishing process that you could pass on to emerging writers?
I don’t know who said it to me—it was probably many different writers and teachers at different times—but just keep writing. There’s no shortcut, unfortunately. You’re going to get rejected, you’ll get stuck in your story, it will be hard, but you just have to stick with it. (This is not groundbreaking advice, I know.) I also loosened my idea of what ‘finished’ looks like… there’s just a point you have to send your story or manuscript out into the world and say, that’s as finished as I can get it for now—and then let people read it.
For extra content, our managing editor chatted with Clara over on your YouTube Channel!
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