Sequoia Nagamatsu: On Death Economics, Fostering Strong Literary Communities, Bending Genres, and His Debut Novel ‘How High We Go in the Dark’
When Sequoia Nagamatsu first began writing the stories that would later inspire How High We Go in the Dark, he was living in Japan, teaching, writing, and mourning the death of his grandfather. He was still questioning how serious he was about writing, but years later, his time in Japan would prove important in the development of his first novel.
How High We Go in the Dark is set in a dystopic future where an artic virus has been unleashed and society suffers the physical, emotional, and spiritual maladies of life during a plague. Through interlinked stories that span space and time, Nagamatsu depicts a world that is both familiar and unknown. How High We Go in the Dark is about the ways people are torn apart during quarantine and how they create community and find hope against all odds.
I spoke with Sequoia via zoom about his novel, why building literary communities is important, and how writing through grief helped him explore conversations he never got to have.
Shelby Hinte: Can you share a bit about the origin story of How High We Go In The Dark?
Sequoia Nagamatsu: The oldest chapter was the Melancholy Nights chapter [which takes place] in an internet café in Tokyo Internet Café. An internet cafe seems kind of an archaic thing right now. I wrote that in 2007 or 2008. I was still a very green writer then and was deciding if I was going to write seriously. That story was important in my development. It was included in an international anthology, and it gave me the confidence and community to move forward.
I was in Japan and working on it at the heels of my grandfather’s death. I was doing a lot of processing of my emotions, grieving, and thinking about how people honor those they've lost when there is guilt involved and traditional forms of saying goodbye aren't an option. I was fascinated by what the Japanese were doing in terms of trying to address logistical issues of a large aging elderly population. There are funerary skyscrapers in Tokyo. There are neighborhoods coming together to share urns as a space saving venture. There are all sorts of other, more outlandish, wild alternatives. As I was looking at all these various funerary processes, I sort of saw them as ways of providing space to enter into a dialogue with your own emotions and to talk about death in a healthy way. The modern process of death doesn't really leave a whole lot of room to honor the dead. A lot of those early stories were thinking about different ways that we could do that, and different ways that we can move on. I wrote several stories in that vein for several years, and I didn't really know that I was writing a novel. I published a collection (Where We Go When All We Were Was Gone) before this novel inspired by Japanese myths, and so I guess I procrastinated writing this novel by writing another book.
SH: I love what you have to say about grief. In the novel the characters always seem to struggle with either facing grief or turning away from it. What was it like for you to write a book that so heavily revolves around grief?
SN: The original seed of the book stemmed from my own grief and the “Elegy Hotel” chapter is pretty autobiographical. There was a lot of guilt of not returning home when I should have and not being able to say goodbye when I might have had the chance. Then my father died about a year and a half ago. I was editing the book post-sale and I felt that I was able to enter into a dialogue with these characters. In editing that chapter, I was able to make the right decision where I wasn’t able to in my own past.
SH: In the book, you write a lot about death economics, and you have this line that I really loved: “The plague has reinvented the way we die.” This idea of death as an industry and capitalism exploiting literally anything feels so accurate and scary.
SN: The Elegy Hotel, even though it's monetizing grief and death, it's also providing a space for people to actually heal. In the same way that social media is providing a space for people to come together, but it's also a space where relationships can die. You can reconnect with someone [online] for a long time, but then years pass and all of a sudden, it seems weird to actually pick up the phone and call that person you’re keeping in touch with. On the flip side, when my father died, I shared that loss on Twitter. I actually found a weird solace in near perfect strangers giving me condolences and sharing their own experiences and sliding into my DMs and asking me if I wanted to talk. Especially since I was on lockdown, that kind of extended community was really helpful to me. There's kind of this sense that your online network is part of the milestones of your life.
SH: I've been thinking a lot about that too, especially because of the pandemic. I used to sort of scoff at this idea of “Internet friends” and felt a lot of aversion to social media. Recently I have had similar experiences with connecting to others online and think maybe I was wrong before. In the chapter [“Melancholy Nights In A Tokyo Virtual Café”] the character is in love with this Pegasus avatar and it feels so much more real than their irl world. I got this sense in the book that reality is sort of subjective and that Internet relationships can be as real or more real than the ones in actual life.
SN: I think there is a fine line. Ultimately, Akira in Melancholy Nights decides to switch off and leaves the VR world to embrace life. He probably wouldn't have been able to do that were it not for that online relationship. I think it is important to consider what technology and digital spaces can give us, but at some point, we do need to move on from them.
SH: One of my favorite parts of the book is the way you write about characters trying to communicate with loved ones they've lost. Whether it’s through technology or letter writing or journaling, many of the characters feel strong urges to communicate with or preserve the voice of the deceased. Where do you imagine that desire comes from?
SN: In terms of my own personal life, the influence comes from not being able to have the conversations I should have had with people before they passed, or not knowing people very well the way I should have known them before they passed. I could never ask my grandfather, for example, what his experiences during World War II were like in the internment camps. As difficult as that conversation is, it's also part of my family history and was something that I wanted to talk to him about. I never got to talk to my great grandmother, who inspired the Baba character in the novel, about her experience coming to America in the early part of the 20th century. I think it’s kind of a universal thing for a lot of people to have these missed opportunities. You don’t get a second chance, but you can reimagine. You can have those moments in fantasy. You can give yourself some solace even though it never really happened in real life.
SH: In a way this book is all about that type of yearning. I'm thinking about the characters Laird and Aubrey. It is sort of an unrequited love story.
SN: Yeah, she recognizes that had Laird lived, and had they pursued something, maybe it would have been perfect, and maybe it wouldn't have worked out, but she's choosing the precipice of Laird. She’s choosing the honeymoon period of Laird and he’s always going to be this perfect guy because that's how he exists in her memory and that's how she's choosing to honor him. She’s kind of existing in the space of possibility. That word [possibility] is injected in a lot of parts of the novel. Throughout the novel I wanted there to be this sense that possibility is something that we should hold onto in whatever form you want it to take.
SH: There is a lot of innovative technology in the novel. What is your balance for writing and research, and how do you avoid entering a research vortex?
SN: I don't mind doing a lot of research. I think for me, the trick is to make the research organically a part of me. I separate writing and research sessions quite a bit. For a good chunk of the book I was doing a lot of research and then just internalizing it. I’d forget about the story for a while so that when I come back to the writing, I’m not tempted to include some cool little factoid that doesn't really need to be there. I think there's some compartmentalization going on; I have to say, “this is writing time” and “this is research time,” and I can’t mix those two things up.
SH: What was your writing routine like while working on the novel and how has it changed since the pandemic?
SN: At first, when I was writing in Japan, I was working very long days and I was kind of linguistically and culturally isolated. There weren’t many writing groups I could join there. I’d go home and I didn't watch TV because I didn't really understand it, so I would write for hours when I got home from work. I produced a ton of writing back then and some of that ended up becoming chapters later on. A lot of it was crap. I haven't really revisited that vacuum of productivity in my life. After that period, I was in grad school for my MFA, and it was a really important time in my life for brainstorming and acquiring the tools I needed and the inspiration I needed to think about how I wanted to merge genres. I read a lot of [Italo] Calvino, JG Ballard, Murakami, and George Saunders. So all of these authors are probably kind of swirling around in [my head] having conversations [in my work]. If you look at my story collection — and I'm proud of it. It gave me my tenure track job — but it basically reads like the best of hits of somebody who is learning how to write. You could tell from one story that I was reading a lot of Robert Coover that day and trying to do something experimental. Almost every story is doing something formally different. I’m always going to be a kind of weird writer that's bending genres, but I am also very interested in fairly traditional narratives. I feel like I've throat cleared enough and I'm happy with writing traditional fiction save for maybe some genre flourish.
SH: When do you think that you had your breakaway from that emulation period and developed your own voice?
SN: I would say after grad school. I was producing this other book, but I think I was starting to see the building blocks of How High We Go in the Dark and realizing that the weirdness wasn't necessary. Some of the structural things I was doing in early drafts [included] lists, Government reports — it kind of took the form of that trilogy The Illuminatus! — but I’m just not that kind of writer. If I was a more plot-centered, commercial writer that would have worked, but I’m always going to be a writer that is chiefly concerned with character, relationships, and interiority. I just admitted to myself that the best vehicle for that is a three-four act traditional story. I started writing more of those, and started, I guess, becoming more normal in some ways in my writing. I also admitted to myself that I wanted a larger audience, and I was never going to get that if I kept writing these wackadoo forms. There’s a place for those forms. I love those stories and the small press is always going to be a home for those types of experimental works.
I always wanted to see my book face out in Barnes and Noble. I always wanted to get an agent and have that big splashy launch. I wanted all those things that writers dream about. Even though they say they don't want those things, we all kind of want those things, so, I needed to be honest with myself about the kind of writing I do and what kind of career I want.
SH: What was your experience with getting an agent and finding a publisher for How High We Go in the Dark?
SN: I did query agents, and some agents were already reaching out to me before I had published the story collection, just based on journal publications. My collection really helped me in a lot of ways. I have been part of the lit community for a while now, since about 2007, and I think that played a factor not only in getting an agent, but in the nature of the book deal in that I wasn’t an unknown quantity. Some agents knew who I was. I had some connections with some fairly famous writers. As much as we don’t want to quantify ourselves, publishers will. They will like the fact that you have a twitter following or that you know famous people who can blurb your book.
I’d like to stress what I always tell my students when they ask if it’s necessary to be on social media: you want to be a genuine part of community. A large part of the writing community these days does exist online. You want to be a genuine part of that community in the way you support other people so that when it comes down to having to ask people for blurbs or to be a conversation partner at a book launch, you’re not asking for favors so much as you are asking people that you respect to support you. Essentially you want to avoid transactional relationships. Using the word community instead of network is another way of putting it. A good way of immersing yourself in the community is finding outlets where you can support writers in a more official capacity, whether that is volunteering at a literary magazine or nonprofit, writing book reviews, or offering technical skills you have.
Sequoia Nagamatsu is a Japanese-American writer and managing editor of Psychopomp Magazine, an online quarterly dedicated to innovative prose. Originally from Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. His work has appeared in such publications as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Fairy Tale Review, and Tin House. He is the author of the award winning short story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone and teaches creative writing at St. Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA program. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife, cat, and a robot dog named Calvino.
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Maudlin House, Entropy, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at www.shelbyhinte.com or follow her @shelbyhinte
