【文化欄 #21】ダガー賞受賞作『ババヤガの夜』作者が登場。影響を受けた作品を明かす（ゲスト：王谷晶さん）

"Not 'I Want to' but 'I Have No Choice'" — A Ten-Year-Old's Resolve

Ōtani Akira (王谷晶) knew she would be a writer by the time she was 10 or 11. "The path everyone else seemed to follow—university, job, family—was simply invisible to me," she recalls. After mentally rummaging through every option she could picture, she landed on novelist as the one job a person could do entirely alone, from home. Manga artists need assistants; film directors need hundreds of crew members. Only fiction could be completed by a single person. That conviction never shifted.

No TV, School Refusal — A Childhood Surrounded by Film and Books

Ōtani grew up in rural northern Kantō in an area with no terrestrial TV reception; the family watched only VHS tapes. Her parents had previously run a bookshop in Tokyo, so the house was full of books she was free to read without restriction.

Her grandfather in Sendai subscribed to WOWOW and made it his retirement hobby to record every film broadcast onto VHS, organize the tapes by category, and ship them in batches. Ōtani, who almost never attended elementary school, filled her idle hours watching film after film. She acknowledges that this is where both her visual descriptive style and her habit of "building the world as moving images before writing" were formed.

She started writing secondary-fan (dōjinshi) fiction in middle school and continued through high school, exchanging work with readers via personal websites and "applause" functions, around the time Pixiv was first appearing. Her short story "Baby, It's Oh Tokyo" (collected in Kimi no Rokugatsu wa Kōru) draws on her later experience of day-labor security work and living in a 3-tatami share house—"written more mildly than the reality," she says.

Influences — From Kikuchi Hideyuki to Bret Easton Ellis

The first fiction she fell for was the original Transformers anime; she loved it enough to ask for an Optimus Prime toy for Christmas. Moving into her later elementary years, she discovered Kikuchi Hideyuki's (菊地秀行) Vampire Hunter D through Asahi Sonorama paperbacks and headed straight down the otaku path. She also read widely in the entertainment-fantasy writers of the 1980s and '90s: Kurimoto Kaoru (栗本薫) and Tanaka Yoshiki (田中芳樹).

The pivotal encounter came in her high-school library: Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero (1985). A novel of wealthy Los Angeles youth living for the moment, it was, she says, "a genuine shock for a broke kid from Tochigi." The flat, affectless prose—never maudlin, violence rendered without embellishment—hit her hard, and she devoured everything in that lineage.

After 18 she also fell deep into Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard buddy series (published in Japan by Kadokawa). Crucially, she notes: "It's the translation style that influenced me most, not the originals." The resonance between her own title Kimi no Rokugatsu wa Kōru and Lansdale's Cold in July is, she hints, probably not entirely coincidental.

Back to Tokyo at 27 with ¥100,000 — An Unconventional Commercial Debut

At 18, Ōtani left rural northern Kantō for Tokyo. Around age 22, depression brought her back home. The mere fact of returning after such a deliberate departure was its own shock, and those years are largely blank in her memory.

At 27 her spirits lifted. She worked a full year at a neighborhood supermarket, saved ¥100,000, and headed back to Tokyo with no job and no apartment lined up, moving into a share house she found online.

Her commercial break came through networking, not prize competitions. She tapped contacts from earlier editorial-production part-time work and game-scenario jobs, persistently asking senior colleagues for any writing work going. She handed dōjinshi to editors without hesitation as writing samples, and the first wave of the e-book boom created a surge of demand for original content that she was positioned to catch. One publisher connection led to another noticing her work—a "lucky straw" (warashibe chōja) chain that carried her into commercial authorship.

A Cinematic Creative Process That Begins with Architectural Blueprints

When host Iwai Keiya (岩井啓也) asked whether she builds the world before the story, Ōtani confirmed it immediately. "First I construct the town or building as a 3D space in my head, draw up a floor plan, fix it—then I write. Characters and plot come after." Both she and Iwai traced this to her years in dōjinshi culture, where the practice is to place your own characters inside a world someone else has already built.

She writes by watching scenes as if through a film camera, and confesses she wonders how writers who work purely in words manage at all. On the relative absence of taboo in her work—frank violence, raw language—she laughs and calls herself "foreign-literature-addled," then explains: growing up in rural northern Kantō with an intense longing for urban life, she discharged that frustration on the page.