About the Book:
Meet the Hakai Family Hellmakers: Purveyors
of artisan hells and unlucky days to inflict upon your enemies. They’ll make it personal… But for a price!
Onogoro is in the middle of electing a new chief – but, as the deadline looms, a sword-wielding serial killer comes to town. Hyo, busy trying to solve a kidnapping mystery, soon crosses paths with the serial killer himself, who reveals a sinister conspiracy with the future of the island at stake. Promising vengeance, Hyo embarks on her strangest special commission yet – and learns more about the powers of being a Hellmaker…
Find this book on Goodreads. Find on Bookshop.org UK (affiliate link).
About the Author:
Mina Ikemoto Ghosh is a British-Japanese writer who was raised on a diet of Japanese murder mysteries and British fantasy novels. Her own writing often ends up in the shadowy zone between the two. After studying STEM with a BA in Natural Sciences, she entertained family by embarking on misadventures in writing, illustration and freelance translation. She has an MSc in Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford, with focuses on classical Japanese literature and contemporary anthropology, and uses these as sources of inspiration for her stories. She was shortlisted the two times she entered the UK Manga Jiman in 2019 and 2021. Her debut YA, Hyo The Hellmaker was published in 2024.
Interview:
Pitch your book in 10 words!
Elections means trouble for cursed detective on J-fantasy island.
This series is illustrated. What was your favourite moment to illustrate?
For Hyo 2, there’s a later picture I don’t want to mention because it might be spoilery, but otherwise, it might have been the moment that Hyo wakes up to a mysterious spooky ‘presence’ hovering over Mansaku in the night. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to get a certain ‘granular’ look, and initially tried playing around with sculpting coffee grounds on paper. In the end, I used the stain left behind by the grounds instead.
Through Hyo’s world, the story explores colonialism and colonial exploitation. Why do you think we need stories that explore this in both secondary world and our world settings?
We need them as part of the ongoing conversation reflecting on the times we live in. Our present was built on globalisation built on empire, and we seem intent as a world to invent new forms of empire, just to maintain globalisation within that particular model, so the short answer is, both lest we forget, and to chronicle the contemporary.
It’s complicated coming from a Japanese background, as Japan’s been the coloniser with its own imperial agenda in the Asia-Pacific (and Hokkaido and Okinawa), and then been occupied by the USA post-WWII, which has its lingering legacy. I’m not saying that occupation was comparable to empire, only that these are the stories that colour my perspective. My other background is mixed British and Indian, and the story I have there, in my family, is one of total cultural guillotining for the sake of assimilation, so I’m prone to imagining culture as a living performance that can be killed. I think of my grandfather’s choices, and it just highlights for me that we’re of different generations. My generation is the one that feels less need to perform gratitude or pride in a former or present empire to be ‘good’, so, hey, I’m all up for taking advantage of that freedom in what we can say about the system of empire. It’s a privilege previous generations would’ve found harder to come by.
To be truthful, I’m not sure how much Hyo 2 really effectively explores colonialism, as opposed to the colonising gaze and intentions at the roots of anthropology (it’s changed now after discipline soul-searching), inventorising non-European cultures for Empire; and also, the commodification of J-culture (or any non-Western culture) for Western tastes, how artefacts have been sold to offer an ‘Other’ of fantastical fascination, divorced from the local human knowledge and memory (say in the trade of old Japanese swords) that made them ‘living’.
Maybe writing a secondary world inspired by Japanese culture whilst being published by a UK publisher made reflecting on J-culture consumption inevitable, but I’m happy to say that, over the two books, I’ve been able to write what I want in a way I’m good with and I’ve been trusted with all the freedom to do so.
What’s something that inspired this book that you think might surprise readers?
One of the Lonelistener’s ways of gaining people’s dependency was uncritically validating every thought they had and speaking to them in the voice of their own thoughts, essentially trapping them in an echo chamber of their own mind. It was initially inspired by social media algorithms, but then I heard about sycophantic AI chatbots and how people had been driven to extreme behavioural changes by them, so that was at the back of my mind in later drafts.
Mansaku is a more prominent character in this second instalment. What prompted you to focus more on him this time around?
I did an initial draft that was much more ‘Natsuami and the unintended Three Thousand Three Fall consequences’-focused, but it became clear, as I was writing about the sword and the tsukumogami (object spirits), that Mansaku had more skin in the story and more meaningful ways of contributing to it. Pivoting to focus on his and Hyo’s relationship finally gave the mystery a beating heart, and I cut so much of their backstory from Hyo 1 that I was happy to be able to bring that in!
If you were in Hyo’s world, what kind of God would you like to become, or would you prefer to be a hellmaker?
Fun question! I think, in Hyo’s world, I would rather not be a god, as I wouldn’t want to be bound to humans and how they’d be constantly renegotiating who I was and what I could do, but I think Tokifuyu’s en-giri powers have a certain appeal? It’d be nice to be able to offer that freedom of cutting a toxic ex, or a safe place for someone who’s been hurt by a relationship. Having said all that, I would probably prefer to be a hellmaker!
If you were to craft a curse what kind of curse would it be and for which of your pet peeves?
I think I’d be too afraid to curse anyone in case it reflected back on me, haha. But, if I were tempted, then, maybe, for the people who walk up escalators and stop at the last two steps, just before or as the escalator flattens, then continue standing there, blocking the walking side, maybe they could be looped back to the bottom of the escalator.
Please recommend a UKYA book you think readers will love.
AUGMENTED* by Kenechi Udogu – So fun to see a sci fi story so determinedly set in London, and it’s fascinating to see the intricate worldbuilding for imagining living with the consequences of our current climate disaster (they need cooling suits to get between the tube exit and their front door). The story has lots to offer a YA audience in thinking on what kind of person they want to be and in what kind of society they’d want to be part of.
Thank you, Mina!
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