The story behind the story

In October, 1998, my Japanese grandmother sent me a box of papers. Inside that box were old photographs, postcards, letters, drawings; a collection that captured my family's history on paper. Almost everything was familiar, as grandma had shown me the contents of that box many times when I was a child. One collection of papers was unfamiliar, however - pages of handwritten Japanese that looked very old. I couldn't read them. My mother couldn't read them. Grandma told me she'd explain the contents when she visited that Christmas - she said she was the only one who could read the antiquated Japanese they contained.

Before translating the contents to me (though she admitted she knew them by heart so was really reciting rather than translating) grandma told me all she knew of the back story. A relative on my grandma's side of the family had written the letters in the latter part of the 19th century (I named the relative Sankatsu and moved the time period to the beginning of the 19th century for the book). There were numerous scraps of incomplete letters, and two whole letters, one of which told us what grandma already knew - Sankatsu's sister had been sold by her father and the two girls hadn't seen each other for many years. The fragments and second complete letter painted a picture that sparked my imagination. Family rumours, handed down over many decades, added to that picture.

My grandmother had her theories about what had happened to the two sisters. She was still thinking up new ones, she said. She shared all of them with me. Some detective work and research, and a lot of my grandma's imagination, transformed those pages of writing into the preliminary pages for "My Dearest Osan".