India, Jan. 10 -- 1Did you write the novel during the pandemic or did you approach it later? I had been wanting to write this book even before the pandemic. It was more about fitting a male character and a female character together in one setting, each of whom comes bearing a heavy emotional burden. The burden each one carries could or could not be criminal in nature, but they're not criminals even though they're not very sure because there is something they both feel very guilty about. I wasn't really planning to write about the pandemic, but when the pandemic hit us, I continued with the story and changed the setting of the book: a male character and a female character meet, carrying emotional burdens, with the pandemic as the backdrop. 2How did you deal with the pandemic and how did it influence your writing? At the beginning of it, I was living alone in my apartment in Tokyo. But as time went by and things started getting worse, I could only see people and friends who were in the close vicinity of my neighbourhood, so I decided to move back to my hometown in Iwate, which is where the novel is set. I lived there for the duration of the pandemic. My younger sister had just had a baby so I helped around taking care of them, and perhaps that is why the pandemic didn't weigh so heavily on me. Iwate is a sort of rural area and it is the kind of the town where everybody knows everyone else's business and knows what's going on with other people. So, when anyone contracted the virus, the news spread in an instant, and most of the town would start to look at them as though they had done something wrong. When people moved to that prefecture from big cities, they were treated as outsiders, just as in the novel, and they weren't welcomed either. The inhabitants would isolate the so-called outsiders, and that's how my novel's core theme came into being. 3How did your visit to India impact you? I believe that my experience in India actually influenced the writing of Someone To Watch Over You. When I was travelling to Varanasi in 2016 for my sister's friend's wedding, I saw a lot of corpses of deceased people coming down the river. At the same time, there were tourists who were positioned in places where they could witness that sight, and there were hawkers selling things around me. That entire setting of the living and the dead co-existing in and above the water stayed with me as I later wrote the novel. 4Why do you think so many Japanese authors play with the themes of isolation and loneliness? I feel a lot of writers approach and write about this theme of isolation and "being by yourself" because it is so close to them and it is very accessible. It's right there. It's a topic worthy of exploring because so many people can relate to it....