An Idol for Emiko

By Travis Heermann

In 17th-century Japan, Emiko has always been an outcast in her fishing village. When strange coins wash up on the shore near Emiko's fishing village, she is the only one who resists the wave of greed overtaking everyone she has ever known.

How long can she resist the pressure from her neighbors and from her own poverty? How can she protect her son from the half-seen forms that now lurk in the nearby sea?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bear Paw Publishing
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386244233

Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann grew up in the countryside of Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln with a BS in electrical engineering. In 2003, he shifted careers and moved to Fukuoka, Japan, to teach English to young students in public schools. Amazon.com called his first novel, The Ivory Star, “a must have for every sci-fi reader.” Soon afterward, Heermann immersed himself in Japanese culture and history and combined his passion for folklore and fantasy literature. The result is Heart of the Ronin, a tale of a teenage warrior in thirteenth-century Japan, and the first volume in the Ronin Trilogy. On Ronin Writer (travisheermann.com/blog), Heermann’s blog about the writing life, he posts an ongoing series of in-depth interviews with authors in a variety of genres.

Book preview

AN IDOL FOR EMIKO

By

Travis Heermann

I

We all suspected that Emiko would give in soon. We had long prepared her funeral ceremony to signify her passage from this world to the other, but all these years she had resisted.

The fishermen sometimes reported sighting her on her veranda, looking out over the Ariake Sea, a lone, hunched figure. They sometimes saw her waist-deep in surging froth, a bulwark against the tide, even in winter, head bowed under the weight of age and ugliness and stubbornness. She would have suffered less if she had listened to us.

Sometimes the fishermen even claimed to see her out there with her idiot son huddled next to her, with his spindly arms and lumpen features like a pale, crumpled spider; of course, that was impossible.

When Taro was alive, those two had kept to themselves, secluded in that decrepit house with the portion of once-resplendent tiled roof now collapsed in disrepair, that house that had once belonged to the proud Otomo clan. Before Taro’s crimes, he would sometimes answer the door and gaze up at the visitor, all slack face and watery eyes, tongue licking absently at cracked lips, and he would croak something to his mother, and she would shout back from the depths of the house to send the visitor away.

The nail that sticks up must be pounded down, as the saying goes, and ever since the village had grown prosperous, Emiko had been like a jagged splinter hiding in a freshly polished floor.

Her grandfather came from old samurai blood, but after Tokugawa’s rise to power, much of the Otomo clan had been scattered like leaves in an autumn wind. Emiko’s grandfather had been one of