What is the title of your latest release?
THE SAMURAI’S OCTOPUS
What’s the “elevator pitch” for THE SAMURAI’S OCTOPUS?
Shogun meets Memoirs of a Geisha in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter of the 1790s.
How did you decide to start writing historical mysteries set in Japan?
I started out writing modern day mysteries set in Japan, but the past is still so present here in every way—from how people dress to the way they give foreigners the side-eye, as if 300 years of samurai-era isolation had barely ended—and you can’t really write about the present here without writing about the past. Then the characters in the flashbacks became too interesting to keep off the stage, and once they were there, they kind of took over.
Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Absolutely. Like most writers, I write what I read, and what really hooks me on a book is if I love being in that world and spending time with those characters. When someone tells me they dragged their feet as they got near the end of one of my books because they didn’t want it to end, I go around with a grin on my face all day long.
What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Resourceful. Resilient. Skeptical.
What’s something unexpected you learned while researching and writing THE SAMURAI’S OCTOPUS?
Did you know there were barbers in the pleasure quarter whose specialty was re-attaching severed samurai topknots? One of the outrageous things first-rank courtesans in Yoshiwara were allowed to do was conduct mock trials of their patrons if they caught them being “unfaithful.” Lopping off the miscreant’s prized topknot was a typical punishment, but a samurai would rather walk down the street stark naked than appear in public without his distinctive hairdo. Thus, the extensions trade was born.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Both. Many times. A kerbillion times.
Describe your writing space/office!
My desk is surrounded on all four walls by bookshelves for the 800+ mystery novels I might read again someday. Various small plastic figures are camped around my monitor: a set of vintage Reboot action figures, a rubber dinosaur head finger puppet, a reading hedgehog I got from a capsule toy machine, and a Godzilla dressed as Alice in Wonderland.
Who is an author you admire?
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, whose books (in particular THE SQUARE OF SEVENS and THE ART OF A LIE) so exquisitely bring to life a couple of resourceful young women who overcome impossible situations through their own wit and wiles. It’s so hard to do that without stepping outside the constraints of the historical period, but her characters walk that line perfectly, while also being charming people to spend time with.
Is there a book that changed your life?
I’m going to resist giving a more amusing answer to this question, because the truth is, CASTE by Isabel Wilkerson changed my worldview profoundly. I don’t go a day without being horrified at just how different living in America is for people who are not white, and how baked-in the inequality has always been.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Historical fiction, of course! Especially lately, because it doesn’t just help me escape current reality for a few hours, I know that whatever despots, plagues and general evildoing existed in that time period, humanity survived, the pendulum swung, and life took a turn for the better again.
What other genres would you like to explore writing?
I would love to write speculative fiction (SciFi and fantasy have always been my guilty pleasures) but alas, I think there are so many great SpecFic writers out there right now, the world doesn’t need another one.
What’s your favorite movie?
My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki.
What is your favorite season?
Fall. Yeah, I know, I live in Japan, land of cherry blossoms. But spring is cold, windy and insanely crowded here—I’ll take strolling in a Japanese garden on a balmy fall afternoon under the changing maple leaves over The Pinkness any day.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
Every year I try to sneak it by without anyone noticing, so I don’t have to get a year older.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I just read Andrew Rubin’s Hell or High Winter, which is like a wickedly witty Thor Ragnarok meets Good Omens. Imagine what shenanigans the old gods from every human civilization might get up to when they realize nobody is paying attention to them anymore.
What’s an upcoming tv show/movie/book/podcast you are anticipating?
Shogun, Season Two!
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
They’ll take away my visa if I don’t say Japanese.
What do you do when you have free time?
Read!
What can readers expect from you next?
A murder mystery set in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, in which clues hidden in a woodblock print point the finger at a killer who thought they were untouchable, and also change the life of a foreigner living in Tokyo, two centuries later.
Waving at you across the wide, blue Pacific,
Jonelle
For readers who loved the intrigue of Shogun and the women in Memoirs of a Geisha . . .
It’s the year 1784 and the shogun rules with an iron fist . . . except within the walled pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara. Inside the Great Gate, samurai law does not apply, and it’s women who pull the strings. Magistrates bow to courtesans, prostitutes snub potentates, and those with the most power beg favor from those with the least. There is no greater spectacle in all the land.
But beneath the surface runs a deadly current of greed, deception . . . and murder.
Takahisa Takeda will never forgive the first shogun for rewarding his ancestor’s loyalty with more honor than land. He’s the head of a venerable samurai family who can barely make ends meet, until the night he witnesses a terrible crime and seizes the opportunity to turn tragedy into gold.
Birdie is just a child when she’s chosen to serve Yoshiwara’s number one courtesan and given a new name at the House of Treasures. Like every girl growing up in the pleasure quarter, she longs to become one of the beauties strutting down the promenade under a crimson parasol, entertaining lords of the land in robes that cost more than a laborer makes in a year. But the higher she climbs, the more she realizes those she trusts with her life might also betray her in a heartbeat, and she’ll need all her wit and wiles just to survive.
Caught between two powerful men whose futures both hinge on the night that made Takeda rich, Birdie's only way out is to discover why the victim had to die, and hunt down a witness whose life depends on not being found. Only then can she decide whose crime to punish and whose to keep hidden. If she chooses right, she will win her freedom. If she chooses wrong, she’ll be forever trapped by the fate she’s trying so desperately to escape.
Mystery Historical [ Seventh Street, On Sale: April 21, 2026, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781645061151 / eISBN: 9781645061298 ]
Jonelle Patrick is the author of six novels set in Japan, and has been writing about Japanese culture and travel since first moving there in 2003. The Japanese government awarded her a cultural visa for writing about Japan in 2023, and she regularly contributes to the monthly e-magazine Japanagram, The Tokyo Guide I Wish I’d Had and Only In Japan. She’s a graduate of Stanford University and the Sendagaya Japanese Language Institute, and a member of the Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, and the Historical Novel Society. She divides her time between Tokyo and San Francisco.
No comments posted.
© 2003-2026