July Newsletter
Greetings from Tokyo!
Hope you’re doing well and not suffering the summer heat.
We’re coming to the end of a very unusual rainy season in Tokyo. Typically, the rainy season begins in the second week of June and lasts through the third week of July. It rains every day, often in sudden downpours.
This year the rainy season began as scheduled but soon gave way to a two-and-a-half-week, record-breaking heatwave.
To combat the heat, we took a trip to Atami, a seaside town on the Izu Peninsula. If you’d like any recommendations in the area, let me know. See below for a picture.
For the past two weeks, however, it’s been raining, and the rainy season seems to be concluding as it always does in the third week of July. Next up, the heat and bugs of August. The bugs are actually quite charming in a big-silly-bug kind of way, some of them at least.
I recently finished a manuscript, Toast of Tokyo (title pending), the third book in the Tokyo Whispers series. The main characters are Marcelle Renaud, a French modiste with a boutique on Tokyo’s glamorous Ginza Boulevard, and Shige Koide, owner of Tokyo’s first department store.
The story, set in 1900, touches on a lot of my favorite turn-of-the-twentieth-century trends: the department store as a feature of urban life, astronomical art, lovers’ inns, Gilded Age culture, ready-to-wear fashion, colonial resistance, lovers’ inns, the shifting social relevance of the nobility, silent films, the social impact of the sewing machine (looking at you, Singer), lovers’ inns, engineering advances in rail travel, and outdoor modeling promenades.
I may have mentioned lovers’ inns. These don’t exactly qualify as a turn-of-the-century trend, but with Marcelle and Shige’s chemistry, it feels like they’re trending.
How are you beating the summer heat? Let me know if you have a chance.
Wishing you happy summer reading,
Heather
View of Atami from our room at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. We’re wearing the ryokan’s cotton kimonos called yukatas. After spending the day on the beach, we took a hot springs bath at the ryokan and changed into the yukatas for dinner. Most ryokans provide dinner and breakfast. Atami is famous for seafood, and we ate a lot of it. Even grilled fish for breakfast😯
If you’re interested in reading Scandals of Tokyo or Talk of Tokyo before Toast of Tokyo (title pending) you can get these titles from Boroughs Publishing Group, Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes&Noble.
If you’ve read Scandals of Tokyo or Talk of Tokyo, I’d very much appreciate your review!
Please review at Goodreads, BookBub, Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes&Noble, or wherever you’d like.
