The Sun coughed. "What is your name?"
"Uh, what?" Toshie managed to mumble.
"Well met, Uh-What!" the sun said.
"No, no, no. My name is Toshie," she said.
Here we are, the eponymous hero!
And how did I get the name Toshie?
If you don’t know how Japanese names work, they are (generally) written in kanji, which are characters taken from Chinese. Last names are pretty straightforward. There’s not too much variation on how you read them. Sometimes there are differences, but even as a non-native speaker of the language, I can pronounce someone’s last name correctly most of the time.
Then there are first names.
Many character combinations have different readings, and many names have different characters you can use to write them. Most forms ask you to write how to read your name.
So! My wife and I were in a meeting, and when my wife wrote her name, the older man with whom we had the meeting read it as “Toshie.” This isn’t wrong, as the characters for her name can" be read that way, except that it’s wrong in that it isn’t her name.
So, I teased my wife by calling her Toshie. This did not fly.
I lovingly tease my wife in many ways, but “Toshie” was right out. She said it sounded like an old woman. I respect my wife, so I stopped. But a seed had been planted in my brain. I had just failed to write my “epic novel” brewing in my brain since college. It just wasn’t working. But how my wife said “Toshie” sounded like an old woman’s name sparked an idea in my head.
What if someone had named their daughter Toshie, and it felt like an old woman’s name to that person? And that person was a millennial working a dead-end job, accompanied by the traditional millennial ennui? And then, in the “prime” of her life, she just died.
Why her? Why anyone?
Then, she wakes up in a fantasy world from a game and a series of books. An isekai! But she’s not a gamer. She doesn’t know anything about isekai fantasy other than that a friend suggested she read a book. Toshie never read it. You know. Life is busy as a millennial with ennui.
That’s where it all sparked. I wanted to write a book, and someone said my wife’s name wrong.
Toshie the Hero and the Orbs of Destiny is available now!
Books 2 and 3 will be released in 2025.
Please check out the April Blogging from A to Z Challenge
#AtoZChallenge
a-to-zchallenge.com