Laurie R. King

(Mary Russell’s War will show up on Wednesday this week.)

From Dreaming Spies:
As the shops thinned and gardens peeped between the houses, we neared what could only be a ryokan. Ancient wood, well-maintained thatch, raked gravel, and a small and perfectly spontaneous garden on either side of the entrance. Everything—thatch, gate, stones, tree bark— might have been manicured at dawn. If I’d been told that the gardener had chosen the precise arrangement of cherry blossoms drifting across the moss, I’d not have doubted it for a moment.

Minaguchi-ya

Many years ago I read a little paperback by a man named Oliver Statler. It was a novel, more or less, based on Statler’s experiences in Japan, where he first went as a member of an occupying army. There he met a traditional inn, a ryokan, with a long history. The little book he wrote about that inn is a small gem, decorated with traditional drawings, tracing the history of the Minaguchi-ya’s twenty generations of family.

The inn would have looked something like this:

Although now it looks more like this:

* *

Only one more day until Dreaming Spies! Other posts about writing and researching the book can be seen here, or you can read a long excerpt here. 

You can order a signed copy from Poisoned Pen Books or Bookshop Santa Cruz, and unsigned or e-books from Indiebooks, Amazon/Kindle, or Barnes & Noble/Nook.

My upcoming events are here.