As a young reader, I loved novels which began with a map. J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ and the books in Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series immediately spring to mind. The map set the scene for a great adventure and was something to refer back to when the story got complicated. It might have been factual or fanciful, a quick sketch or full of details. It didn’t matter. Somehow, a map made the story feel more real.
As a writer, I haven’t yet included maps in my novels, but I always draw one, or several, to help situate myself in the street, town or area I’m writing about. Using a real location is easier in some ways. Everything is already there – names, places and histories. To visualise a specific spot or to figure out how a character would travel from one place to another, all I have to do is look on Google Maps. In the first three novels of my Hanazawa Information Services series, the main setting was Greater Tokyo, but I had a few things to figure out, including where the company office would be located and what the neighbourhood would be like. I decided on the Kanda district of Tokyo as a general location for the office, studied a map of the area for ideas, drew a fictional city block and then wrote about it. This is my description of the office location in ‘Way of the Mikan’:
The four-storey building, the site of Hanazawa Information Services, looked much the same. Still grey and still bland. Joe had selected the location for its anonymity and convenience. Awajicho Station was the nearest, but the office was also within easy walking distance of stations at Kanda, Akihabara and Shin-Ochanomizu and less than a mile north-east of Tokyo Station. The area didn’t have a specific character. It was largely commercial with apartment buildings slotted between or above the shops and offices. Within the surrounding block were an estate agent’s, a Chinese language school, an izakaya, a three-star hotel and a shop selling hand-dyed, indigo clothing from Tokushima Prefecture.
Using a fictional location in a novel means starting from scratch. Everything has to be placed and named. Histories have to be created. But sketching out an imaginary location can open up the story to new possibilities. While I’m drawing the rivers that flow through the fictional town of Nishihama on the Japan Sea coast, the setting for the fourth book, I’m also thinking about the many rivers I’ve seen in Japan, the straight ones lined with concrete, the few that have been ‘unimproved’, and the birds that lived on and next to them. And I’m thinking about where Sam, the main character, will be living in relation to the town, what kind of view he’ll have and what his neighbours will be like. It’s a smallish town. How will he get around? I’m also thinking about where my other characters will live and where they’ll go to within the story, for example, the local supermarket, senior high school, community centre, restaurants and bars and the public bath house. I add detail to the map. As I draw, and often re-draw, thoughts, connections and stories develop. The physical act of drawing seems both to clarify my thinking and inspire new ideas.
While writing my novel ‘Whileaway Island’, a story that follows a young, British woman from London to a privately owned island close to the Great Barrier Reef, I had the idea of representing her emotional journey – starting point, progress, detours and difficulties, destination – in map form. In the end, I didn’t include it in the novel, but drawing it helped me think about the character’s story in a different way.
My map of Nishihama isn’t complete. I’ll fill in more details as I write them.
d j mantle 