Talk with Author Simon Rowe at David Duff’s home, April 14, 2024

Nine people gathered to listen to Simon Rowe talk about his phenomenal success in publishing and other things on April 14 in Kyoto. Thanks very much to David Duff for opening his home/library once again for an event. Due to the absence (by illness) of John Dougill, we didn’t have an emcee, but I asked Simon if he needed formal introductions etc. and he said no, so the talk proceeded in a very casual way, with participants inserting questions and comments throughout.

As most people probably know, Simon is a New Zealander by birth and also spent a lot of time in Australia (Melbourne)。This childhood, as well as access to National Geographic magazine, gave him a curiosity about the world and a sense of adventure. He became a travel writer with many articles to his credit in various publications, traveling and writing handwritten notes and taking slides with an SLR camera. He was successful, especially during the Bubble economic period when there was a lot of venture capital floating around and publishers were buying articles in bulk. He emphasized the importance of “hustle”, and said that if one thing goes right (you get a “break”) it gives you the confidence to follow it up and more things start to come in.

He also said that the effect of the Internet has been that travel writing as a literary form has declined due to the “information dump” of YouTube etc. with everyone getting into the act, and it is important to have an angle (“spin”) which makes popular places look different. He also stressed the importance of authenticity in writing, and the trust that the writer knows his milieu (cultural, literary, etc.) makes the reader engage with fiction that may have something unfamiliar about it.

Simon segued into his experiences creating the character of Mami Suzuki, first in Pearl City (2020) and now in his new successful Mami Suzuki, Private Eye (Penguin 2023), who is a detective with a day job in a large hotel in Kobe, a single mother who lives with her mother and daughter. (See review, below.) He described his difficulties with people in the US who were concerned about cultural appropriation and wondered why a foreign man was writing about a Japanese female protagonist. However, due to his years in Japan (presently in Himeji) he knows what he is talking about in this culture, and in the case of the latter book he got a cover blurb from a female Japanese author in the detective genre, Naomi Hirahara, which was like a “seal of approval” which negated murmurs of cultural appropriation etc.

 Interestingly, the literary festivals in India where he recently took this character and book were delighted with Mami Suzuki and were not the least bit concerned with cultural appropriation. In fact he found himself very busy traveling around the country and attending various literary festivals and was enthusiastically received everywhere. His agent is an Indian lady in Bangalore who arranged for a lawyer to oversee (and edit) his publishing contract with Penguin books. (Penguin had taken a couple of years to get back to him about publishing his book, but eventually did.) Unfortunately, Penguin did not pay for his trip to India, but the contacts he made were worth it.

Some advice from Simon about the publishing world – bullet points I wrote down:

  • Importance of contracts and agents – to get help with this side of things and to keep things on an unemotional (business) plane
  • Contacting famous people for favors – they can only say no, and may say yes. Help becomes mutual once one has contacts.
  • “Catching the wave”, feel the energy and always keep putting more in
  • Royalties for books are NOT equivalent to your effort, don’t rely on them

He now is negotiating for film rights. We will eagerly follow his successes from now on.

Happily, Simon knows his way around Japan so didn’t require help with transport, etc. There were still a few people there talking to him when the meeting broke up around 6:15pm.

Thanks very much to Simon for taking the time to give us this very interesting talk.

Members Edward J. Taylor, Cody Poulton, Felicity Tillack, and Kirsty Kawano listen attentively.


REVIEW of Mami Suzuki, Private Eye (Penguin, 2023) by Simon Rowe

Review by Rebecca Otowa

On the cover of this book, it is written, “From the Kobe wharfs to the rugged Japan Sea coast, the subtropics of Okinawa, and a remote island community in the Seto Inland Sea, each new adventure ends with a universal truth – that there are two sides to every story of misfortune.” I resonate with this, as my own short stories often invite readers to witness epiphanies in the lives of the protagonists; and to arrive at an understanding of why they acted and thought as they did.

We first met Mami Suzuki as the detective in “Pearl City”, the first story in the collection Pearl City – Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020) and this story, with very slight changes, comprises the first part of Mami Suzuki – Private Eye. The author said that it provided the inspiration for the writing of the novel, due to the great positive feedback he received, particularly from female readers. This detective must find her way through the distractions of single motherhood, living with her young daughter and aging mother (who sometimes accompany her on her travels), consoling herself with a beer late at night as she mulls over her cases, which have come to her by word of mouth and which she solves in the moments she has free between her job as a hotel clerk in Kobe and the demands of her personal life.

Simon said to me, “Mami Suzuki is a ‘quiet’ read, and though the mysteries themselves aren’t that hard to solve, they place a lens over the human condition – a whydunit rather than a whodunnit”. I myself appreciated the compassionate tone of Simon’s writing in this and other works. This is not a “hard-boiled” detective novel with a body count. It is easy to imagine these “crimes” being perpetrated by ordinary human beings, who had pressing reasons for doing as they did. It is not the usual detective story, in which “right triumphs” as the criminal is brought to justice; it is much more complex than that.

Mami Suzuki has human problems and distractions. She is also appreciative of the finer things of life, from a good shot of whisky to designer clothes, as she juggles the mundane details of her life, and there is even a tanned, middle-aged fisherman to provide romantic interest and with whom she bounces the case details around. The stories move at a peaceful pace, with many small details sprinkled over the scenes, bringing them to vivid life and pointing up the author ‘s easy familiarity with the settings.

Mami Suzuki – Private Eye is a story which calls to mind travel writing at its best – it can transport you to many places, including a pearl-sorter’s workstation or the precincts of a sunlit shrine garden, and make the reader feel at home in all of them.

For Simon Rowe’s numerous works on the Writers in Kyoto website, please see this link.