![]() ![]() ![]() Interview with TOMO Contributor Jennifer Fumiko Ca. ![]() I was immediately hooked, and began putting together the story that would become Samurai Shortstop, my first published novel! I ran to the library, checked out a book about Japanese baseball, and learned they not only had baseball in 1915, they'd been playing baseball since the 1860s, when they'd gone through the tumultuous Meiji Restoration that radically changed the face of Japan after centuries of Shogun rule. ![]() Alan’s award-winning books include The Brooklyn Nine, Fantasy Baseball, Starfleet Academy: The Assassination Game, Prisoner B-3087, and The League of Seven, the first in a series of alternate history middle grade fantasy novels. I had always assumed the Japanese learned baseball from American GIs during the Allied occupation after World War II. In 2006, he published his first novel, Samurai Shortstop, an ALA 2007 Top Ten Book for Young Adults. I already knew the Japanese were mad for baseball-baseball was one of my other interests-but 1915? That seemed far too early. It was in one of those travel guides that I saw a picture of a man throwing out the first pitch at a 1915 national high school baseball tournament in Japan. From then on I wanted to read everything about Japan I could get my hands on, including more fiction, books about Japanese history, essays by people who had traveled there, and travel guides to Japan in the hopes I would one day get to go. My wife encouraged me to read Shogun by James Clavell and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, two books for adults about Japan, and I loved them. ![]()
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