The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

  All this was even more acute in the Meiji period, when events in the book take place.

  Particularly in Takiko Pepperharrow’s speech, I’ve tried to show what normal, working-class Tokyo Japanese actually sounds like. I should emphasise tried; I only lived in Tokyo for a year and a half, and I’m not a translator. I just eavesdrop in pubs.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I couldn’t have come close to writing this book without the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation. Every year, they send a handful of people out to Tokyo on a nineteen month scholarship. You learn Japanese for a year, live with a Japanese family, and then work at a Japanese company. In 2013, to my continuing bewilderment, they sent me. After my language-learning year, I lived in Hokkaido for a month, at a place called Shari – which is right next to Abashiri. Special thanks to Mitsuru and Katsuya Shishikura, who put up with having me in their attic for that time, and who once drove forty miles to take me out for fish and chips.

  Thanks as well to Dr Christine Corton, who wrote a fabulous book about London fog from which I have stolen all my ideas; to everyone at Gladstone’s Library, which has copies of every single Victorian newspaper you could possibly want, alongside some wonderful pamphlets about early use of electricity; and also to my brother, Jacob, who is much cleverer than me and sorts out all my plot crises.

  All this was even more acute in the Meiji period, when events in the book take place.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She later studied in Tokyo, where she lived on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and she is now a visiting lecturer at City University. Her first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, was an international bestseller, a Guardian Summer Read, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won a Betty Trask Award. The Bedlam Stacks, her second novel, was published in 2017. She lives in Bath.

  @natasha_pulley

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  First published in 2020 in Great Britain

  First published in the United States 2020

  Copyright © Natasha Pulley, 2020

  Map © Emily Faccini, 2020

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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-330-5; eBook: 978-1-63557-331-2

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