What was your research process like in terms of the Tokyo setting and all the details about royalty? It was an easy pivot-I don’t want to say the book was easy to write, because you know -but it felt right the whole time, if that makes sense. I thought about my daughter, and what I would want her to read growing up as a Japanese American, and this book just felt so right. When I wrote Tokyo Ever After, it was right after I had twins in 2017-they’re three and a half now-and I really wanted to write something that felt light and fun. It was so great! You know, I write books and they’re very reflective of where I am in that period of my life. What was it like pivoting from the fantasy and thriller genres to contemporary rom-com? I actually thought it would take a lot longer for the book to sell, but within 24 hours, we were getting positive responses, and then we got an offer, and a preempt, from Flatiron-and it’s been great ever since. It took about six months to write, and about five revisions. I wrote a pretty clean, structured outline and that cut down on revisions-usually a book takes me about a year-so when I went in to revise, there weren’t that many structural changes, just line edits and tweaks.

So it took, let’s see… when did I sell it? I don’t even remember.

How long did it take you to write it, and did you have a long or short revision process?

That evolved into a girl searching for her identity and going back to Japan, and what better way for her to find her cultural roots than with the Imperial family there, who have been established for a millennium? So once I had those two things together, the identity and representation pieces, that was really the driving force behind Tokyo Ever After. I wished with my whole heart to see myself in the books that I loved, in books like The Princess Diaries. And in reflecting on my adolescence, I also remembered not being able to find books that featured Japanese American protagonists, or books that were even written by Japanese Americans. It started more with me being interested in writing a story about a Japanese American, like myself, who is searching for her identity, a place where she belongs, which is something I struggled with as an adolescent. It’s so funny, because that wasn’t where the story started. Can you talk about your inspiration behind this duology? Your book is being compared to The Princess Diaries and Crazy Rich Asians.

Tokyo dreaming by emiko jean