Title: HUNGRY GHOSTS
Author: Barb Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper
Genre: Samurai, Folklore, Supernatural, Spooky, Fantasy
Book Blurb:
More than four centuries ago, Japan lies ravaged by famine and civil war. Takeshi is a young warrior who is under a curse. After an ambush by enemy soldiers, he is left temporarily blinded, but is rescued by a monk. Takeshi thinks that surely no one can help him with the curse—until he finds out that his new monk friend used to be the legendary samurai Taketsura, wielder of the sword Lightning-on-the-Water. Together with the orphan girl Kiyoko (a formidable young swordswoman in her own right), can these three keep each other alive during the supernatural threats of Japan’s era of civil war?
HUNGRY GHOSTS revisits the work of Lafcadio Hearn, a Victorian-era European writer who, in his book KWAIDAN: STORIES AND STUDIES OF STRANGE THINGS (the most famous of his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories), told a story of Isogai Heidazaemon Taketsura, a samurai who renounced his old life and became a wandering priest when Japan lay ravaged by famine and civil war.
This novel brings to life a different imagining of Taketsura’s wanderings, giving him two teenagers to accompany him, a young orphan girl whose grandfather taught her the blade, and a young soldier under an oni’s curse that threatens to turn him into a monster. In the midst of post-war famine and dangers, the three must face death, (other) monsters, and of course ghosts – some of which are their own.
Excerpt:
CHAPTER ONE
I woke up suddenly, jolted awake by...
...nothing. By my dreams.
My head hurt. I couldn’t see anything—there were bandages wrapped around my head, over my eyes. My eyes hurt, too, so I left the bandages where they were for the moment, though I was dying to pull them up and check my vision...
I felt around me. It was soft underneath me. I could just feel that I was indoors, in a room somewhere. Not a big room—it felt a little confining. Smelled like wood and dust. Couldn’t hear much else—everything was pretty quiet. Was it nighttime? Wherever I was, I wasn’t in the cave I’d been hiding in, slowly but surely bleeding to death.
The shikibuton of the futon I’d been sleeping on felt soft and welcoming after the hard, damp cave floor. The blanket around me felt rough, but warm. The air in the room was cool, but not uncomfortably so.
I wanted to look.
“Aim for his eyes,” I remembered a soldier saying. “Without them, he’s nothing.” I bit my lower lip, and reached for my bandages...
—And froze, because I heard a board in the floor make some noise. It was the first odd sound I’d heard, which made it feel like someone had already quietly slipped into the room. Desperately, I reached around for my sword.
I couldn’t feel it anywhere nearby me. If the person in the room was an enemy, then he would be a more dangerous one than I had ever faced before in my life.
Because it was true; without my eyes, I was nothing.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” said a deep male voice.
“Am I...blinded?” I asked.
“The area around your eyes has a couple of deep cuts, but with the compress around that area, you probably won’t go blind... probably. It’s all up to the will of the compassionate Buddha, isn’t it?”
“From what I’ve seen of this world, it’s more like the sleeping Buddha,” I said.
The man laughed. “From what I’ve seen, the Buddha is wide awake. It’s the people who are asleep.”
I laughed a bitter laugh myself, but I was starting to relax, in spite of everything that’d happened, in spite of my dreams that were quickly fading from my memory.
“Now, I’ve brought you some food,” said the man. “Just a little broth, but it might lighten your mood a little.”
“I’m not hungry.” It was surprising, but true.
“You’ve been too long without food—your stomach won’t be ready for a full meal yet anyway, it’ll just make you sick. You should have just a little soup, though, at least. I’ll leave it by your bed. I warn you, though: simple fare doesn’t improve with time.”
I heard him put a tray down by me, to my right. “Thank you,” I said.
“Well, at least you have manners... Most soldiers don’t.”
“Speaking of which, I need my sword.”
“No, you don’t. It wouldn’t help you here.”
“Where is here? Jigoku?”
“...Jigoku? Don’t you think Hell would be warmer than this?”
“I was being... I don’t know. I just...everything is just— I feel—”
“Shh, quiet your mind. Be still. I’ll come back later and see if you need anything.”
“Say that again.”
“Me? I didn’t say anything much. Just to quiet your mind... and be still.”
“That’s what—'be still’—what my father always used to say.”
“Did you obey him?”
“Always.”
“I see that we’ll have a lot to talk about once you get better. But until then, know that you are safe here.”
“Where is here?”
“Tenzin Monastery.”
“Oh. I guess that’s about as far from Jigoku as someone can get. For a young man like me, anyway...”
“It’s my experience that we carry heaven and hell within each of us.”
I was getting tired of the strange way the man spoke. “I’d like to sleep now.”
I heard the door to my room slide shut, nearly silently.
I was alone again. I preferred it that way. My life had always been that way.
And yet... Without being able to use my eyes to guide me, I felt lonelier than I ever had before.
I lay down again.
I was still and unmoving.
But my mind wasn’t quiet.
Instead, I played my last battle over and over again in my head.
My commander had been an idiot. He knew more about the art of partying and having a good time with women and drinking than he did about the art of war. No wonder we were losing. When a commander’s station in life meant more to those in power than his brainpower did, of course things weren’t going to go well. I’d spent most of my time covering for the man’s mistakes.
But, then, my regiment called me “The Little God of Death.” The avatar of the afterlife. Maybe that was my problem; maybe it’d gone to my head. Maybe I’d gotten too sure of myself, too cocky. Killing hundreds of men without a thought might do that to a person. Especially when that person was me, who’d been forced to join the army at fourteen because he’d been blamed for a crime he didn’t commit.
And Lord Yamato had believed the lies!
Or if he didn’t, he let me take the punishment anyway...
Don’t think about that, Takeshi, I thought to myself.
...But how could I not think about it when the very name my father had given me to walk through life with meant “warrior?” How much time had passed, I wondered, since Lord Yamato had unceremoniously dumped me into the military? Time passes quickly, or perhaps not at all, when all one has to think of is one’s survival. When he came back, I decided to ask the man with the deep voice (was he a monk? In spite of the way he talked, I questioned if that could really be true) what month and year it might be.
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What makes your featured book a must-read?
Barb answers: “Hungry Ghosts is a novel for those who love shonen (action-adventure) manga/anime, but want the joy of reading a novel. For those who love Asian supernatural cinema, and K-dramas like The Scholar Who Walks at Night, Tale of the Nine-Tailed, and Alchemy of Souls, Hungry Ghosts combines strong characterization, thrilling action, and Asian mythology in a new, unique way.”
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Open Internationally.
Runs November 12 – November 21, 2024.
Winner will be drawn on November 22, 2024.
Author Biography:
Barb, originally from Minnesota, grew up to become a guitarist/singer-songwriter and got an album put out on the Imp label. However, she also had health issues: chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and extreme environmental sensitivities and allergies. (She also has complex post-traumatic stress disorder due to issues that happened in her youth.)
Park, from central Texas, grew up reading a great deal of comic books, and science fiction and fantasy literature. He stopped reading comics, started again when they got cool, and then someone in the letter columns of the comic Sandman announced that they were doing a fanzine for readers of that comic. Barb and Park both wrote in.
Barb and Park became aware of one another… Park liked the writing Barb submitted to the fanzine, and he wrote to Barb, and they began writing to each other. Then they started talking on the phone… they fell in love… they started visiting one another…
Reader, they got married (to each other).
They wrote about popular culture in columns on the internet... then they started adapting and editing manga for major American publishers importing manga (and sometimes their South Korean and Chinese counterparts) from the far side of the Pacific... Near the end of this, Barb and Park wrote the manga pitch The Hidden for TokyoPop, perfectly timed to appear the week that that company fell apart.
Then Barb and Park wrote the sci-fi vampire graphic novel Half Dead, co-published by Marvel Comics.
Somewhere around this time, Park successfully completed his Ph.D. in literature, and then Barb and Park started writing other projects, prose and comics, both together and independently. More recently, Barb and Park had a successful Kickstarter (with all stretch goals reached) for Hungry Ghosts, their project involving the work of Lafcadio Hearn and his writings about Japanese folklore.
These days, Barb and Park live happily together in Austin, Texas.
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