India, Dec. 31 -- What inspired you to write The Night of Baba Yaga, a novel where two women find each other in the yakuza underworld?

The initial spark was a desire to capture action using prose. There were already plenty of stories of violent men running wild. I liked the idea of focusing on a woman who's so strong and tough she breaks the mould. And it's common in Japan for yakuza to show up in works of fiction as a kind of anti hero or even as romantic figures. I didn't want to go that route. A woman that I used to know got murdered by the yakuza, you see. This was a painful episode for me, and one that made it all too clear that the yakuza aren't fictional characters. They're real. While I was writing, I consulted the work of specia...