The Journey Not the Arrival Matters

The Journey Not the Arrival Matters

 I first encountered this quotation by TS Eliot as the title of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. Naturally, I had to read Leonard Woolf. It was one way of connecting with his wife, whom I count as one of my favorite writers.

It was only gradually that I came to understand the wisdom of Eliot’s observation. Of course, life itself is a journey as we sojourn from birth to the ‘undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns’.  

I have been asked to write about how travel has affected my own writing. 

I spent my childhood in a tiny town in the northwest corner of Indiana with a population of 500. I have many reasons to feel grateful to my parents. Our house was filled with art and music. Reproductions of famous paintings hung on the walls. There was a piano, and my two sisters and I had lessons. There were bookshelves, with the built-in one that lined a wall of the dining room containing works ranging from Kipling to Karl Marx, from Dostoyevsky to Benjamin Franklin.

I’m also very thankful to my father for giving me the most wonderful present I’ve ever received. He introduced me to the world of travel when I was eighteen. 

Dad had done the same for my two elder sisters. On graduating from high school, we were invited to choose from the brochure offered by the so-called ‘American Institute for Foreign Studies’ that managed a number of educational and travel programs centered on cultural exchange. 

One sister chose a Europe-wide tour, the other opted for the French option, spending several weeks in Montpellier. As for me, given my love of English literature, of course I wanted the trip that originated in London. After two weeks of touring the UK, we (that is, me and my cohort of about four hundred young fellow Americans and a host of chaperones) would travel to Paris and to Vienna, thence to Venice to board a ship for a Mediterranean cruise. 

I can’t begin to describe how blissful it was. I ate exotic and delicious food. I visited museums and famous sites and saw places of astonishing beauty and antiquity. Our cruise ship traveled through the Straits of Gibraltar. We had an afternoon in Turkey and a day in Yugloslavia. We spent a week touring Greek islands and then Israel. 

I met people! Not just Americans but foreigners, the like of whom I’d never encountered in Rolling Prairie. When we visited the Eiffel Tower, I got friendly with a French family who begged me to go off with them to see the ‘real Paris’. Naturally, my chaperone refused permission. I was kissed by a Greek sailor in St. Mark’s Square who gave me his photo and address before my chaperone whisked me away. I met a middle-aged sunburned man wearing sunglasses on a beach on the Dead Sea who told me he was a Russian spy. 

I was used to small-town life. Suddenly I felt I’d stumbled upon a world of infinite and enticing possibilities.  

When I landed back in O’Hare, I was the last person off the plane. I had no wish to disembark. I wanted to return to Europe immediately.

With that ambition in mind, I spent a ‘Junior Year Abroad’ and subsequently did an MA in 18th-century English studies at Lancaster University in England. I lived in St. Germain-en-Laye near Paris for a year, working first as an au pair and then, with my boyfriend, teaching English to French housewives and businessmen. I occupied a squat in Groningen, Holland for six months. I got a scholarship for a doctorate at Edinburgh University and lived in a flat in the New Town for four years. I was hired as a professor at a Japanese university and lived on the island of Shikoku for 36 years. And now I’ve returned to Lancaster, to spend some of my retirement here.

My apologies. I’m only now coming to providing an answer to the question I’ve been asked. How has travel affected my writing?

In every way. In all ways. 

I’ve felt particularly blessed to have spent so many years in Japan. I encountered there a culture that is so different from the Western ones I’d been accustomed to that it’s made me reassess and re-examine all my assumptions and priorities. Values I’d blithely assumed were universal were not prized by the Japanese. 

  I was eager to exploit that ‘strangeness,’ that sense of cultural difference in my Inspector Inoue mystery series published under my pen name of Lea O’Harra. In those three novels, I assume the perspective of a middle-aged Japanese detective. Perhaps some may question whether this is cultural appropriation. I can only say that after my long years’ residence in Japan—living in a backwater of the country, where old traditions and customs still hold sway—I feel I have been granted a unique perspective on Japan and the Japanese. I am also married to a Japanese farmer and my three sons consider themselves, first and foremost, as Japanese.

My latest novel, Dead Reckoning (Sharpe Books), is set in the American Midwest, in the tiny town in which I grew up. Writing it, I was reminded of another work by TS Eliot, Little Gidding: ‘We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.’

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Lea O’Harra has published three crime fiction novels set in rural modern-day Japan: Imperfect Strangers (2015); Progeny (2016); and Lady First (2017). These comprise the so-called ‘Inspector Inoue Murder Mystery’ series published by Endeavour Press (UK). She has also had a story included in Best Asian Crime Fiction published by Kitaab Press (Singapore) in 2020.  Sharpe Books has recently reissued the Inoue mystery series and has just published Lea O’Harra’s fourth novel, Dead Reckoning, a stand-alone set in her tiny hometown in the American Midwest. Here is the link to her website: http://leaoharra.com/

DEAD RECKONING

“Both a drama and a thriller, full of twists and human insight.” Thomas Waugh.

Indiana, January 2010.

It’s a hot summer’s day in 1984 when twelve-year-old Gilly and her friend Sally find a dead new-born in a shoebox in the cemetery of their tiny town.

Deciding to keep their discovery a secret, they bury the body in Gilly’s yard.

The results are disastrous. Flowers are mysteriously left on strollers. Two local children disappear and end up dead. A suspect is arrested and confesses, blaming the deaths on the girls’ having taken the dead baby.

Gilly grows up but is haunted by what’s happened. As a young woman, she flees the town and its memories, going all the way to Japan.

Returning with her Japanese husband Toshi to attend her mother’s funeral, Gilly finds the past is not past. She’s threatened, and someone is putting flowers on strollers again.

When another child is abducted, Gilly knows she must discover the truth about what happened all those years ago before more lives are lost.

Lea O’Harra lived in Japan for thirty-six years, working as an English professor at a private university in western Japan. She is also the author of the Inspector Inoue series.

‘Lea O’Harra offers us a whodunnit set in a Japan labouring under the weight of cultural imperialism, a country where the characters find that their friends and lovers are really strangers – and imperfect ones at that…’ Nick Sweet, author of the Inspector Velázquez series.

‘With her deep knowledge of Japanese culture, superb writing, and sensitivity to human foibles. O’Harra has crafted a cross-cultural whodunnit sure to please Japanophiles and mystery lovers alike.’ Suzanne Kamata, author of Losing Kei.

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