This week we have a post from an author who will make his fiction debut in the Department of First Stories of our July/August 2024 issue (on sale June 11) with the moving story “Letters From Tokyo.”  Yoshinori Todo is a Japanese citizen, but he was born in Vienna and has also lived in Munich and London. He speaks four languages fluently—English, Japanese, German, and Russian—and although he currently lives in Tokyo, he writes fiction only in English. In this post, he talks about what is, for him, the most essential element of fiction.   —Janet Hutchings

It is my long-held belief that good fiction—whether we’re talking mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, horror, or plain “literary”—should make the reader feel strongly in some way. The level of success a piece of fiction will enjoy correlates, at least in my view, directly with how deeply and intensely it makes the reader experience these raw and elementary human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and/or disgust. (There are no doubt more emotions, like desire, amusement, awe, and contempt, but the above six might be considered the “basic emotions” on which all others are based.)

Everything else seems secondary. Characterization, mood, theme, setting, even plot itself—they are all necessary and important for good storytelling, no question, but it seems to me that they are necessary and important only insofar as they serve as “tools” that enable the writer to achieve that one difficult and elusive main goal, to wit: to leave the reader overcome and breathless with emotion.

A story can be told in a unique voice with a distinctive vocabulary, it can boast fantastic character developments, beautiful descriptions, and mind-bending plots and sub-plots . . . and yet, if the author fails to make the reader feel passionately about at least some aspect of the story, if the author fails to establish that emotional connection with the reader so crucial to the reading experience, then it won’t leave much of an impression regardless. Something will be missing, and the reader will instinctively pick up on it, finish the story feeling unsatisfied or even indifferent. After all, if a story leaves you emotionally cold, then what’s the point of having read it at all? Surely your time would have been better spent elsewhere.

These emotions are so basic and universal that they transcend age, nationality, ethnicity, culture, even gender and class barriers, and what have you. When they resonate within our hearts, they not only unite and bind us together in our shared experience, they are what make us human (yes, many animals feel them too, but that’s a topic for another day). All living human beings, except maybe for a negligible minority that are emotionally dead inside for whatever reason, experience them to some degree or another. Not everybody may be able to express or understand their emotions well, but they feel them, all right.

I mean, what’s more universally understood than these often-cited examples? You feel sadness if you lose a friend or a beloved family member to violent crime, to an illness, to an accident, to war. You feel sadness and/or anger if you find out that your partner has been carrying on behind your back (and maybe with your best friend to boot!). You feel happiness if the object of your desire gazes deeply into your eyes and assures you with calm sincerity that she or he loves you back. You feel surprise if you discover that the vicious killer that has left a trail of victims in his wake turns out to be your own best friend whom you trusted, and not the butler whom everyone suspected (because, let’s face it, butlers are an especially homicidal breed). You feel disgust when an innocent man, proclaiming his innocence until his last dying breath, becomes a victim of miscarriage of justice and is executed. And so on.

And here it doesn’t matter a hill of beans whether you’re male or female, whether you’re thirteen years old or thirteen years old times six (seventy-eight), whether you’re a high school dropout or a graduate of higher education, whether you’re Japanese or American or Russian or German or Brazilian or Mauritian or whatever, whether you’re a millionaire CEO reading by the swimming pool with an ice-cold glass of piña colada clutched in one hand or a dirt-poor peasant crouching in a tumbledown hut in the middle of nowhere and reading by the uncertain light of a single candle.

These emotions speak to all of us, and it is the fiction writer’s job and responsibility to create characters and scenarios so lifelike, memorable, and achingly relatable that the reader cannot help but feel them, that the reader is . . . yes, manipulated and even tricked into feeling them. Accordingly, in my opinion, how successful a fiction writer is going to be can, almost without exception, be answered with this one simple question: How strongly can the fiction writer make the reader feel?

And when it comes to fiction that’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

I cannot help but feel contempt (that’s just me, though; feel free to disagree) for works of fiction that leave their audience … well, for want of a better expression, “emotionally confused.” I’ve found that many works of so-called literary fiction tend to have this rather annoying characteristic, although not only.

In such stories, a character might ponder long and hard about what they have done or what they are about to do (maybe), and then something completely unrelated and/or out of the character’s control might happen to shake things up a bit, but before we can learn more, the story might end abruptly with neither a clear resolution nor an identifiable moral lesson, almost as if the writer has run out of ideas or steam or most likely both. Or the character might move from one scene or encounter to the next seemingly without purpose, logic, or reason—leaving the reader, upon finishing the story, to scratch his or her head and wonder: What am I supposed to feel now … except maybe confusion? The story might have been slightly sad but also slightly optimistic, maybe slightly suspenseful but also slightly boring, because in the end nothing much of interest happened. Or did it? And anyway, if the character (often uninteresting, if not downright unlikable) doesn’t seem to feel or care all that much, why should the reader?

I don’t know about you, but I always feel cheated reading such a story! I’m not talking about ambiguous endings, though, let me be clear on that; ambiguous endings, if done properly, possess their own special charm that can leave the reader deeply affected. I’m talking about stories with ambiguous emotions, where it is left to the reader to decide what emotion(s), if any, he or she is supposed to take away from them, as if the author was undecided himself or maybe just trying to be particularly clever. Whenever I come across such fiction, I feel an urge to send off an exasperated message to its author: I don’t want to figure out ANYTHING, this isn’t school and this isn’t a psychotherapy session, it’s YOUR job to make ME feel something!

Except I never do, of course. See, I don’t care enough for such works to bother one way or another. In my book, this type of story is a loser, though, plain and simple (maybe a bit harsh, but that’s how I feel). It might be well written—and since it was published, chances are it is—but I for one will put it out of my mind by roughly the speed of sound and move on to the next, hopefully more emotionally satisfying story. A story should be told clearly and concisely, with a clear goal of what emotion(s) it is meant to arouse in the reader. That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

Now take, for example, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. Two of the most famous, successful, and enduring short stories ever written. Much ink has been spilled analyzing and dissecting them, but to me, it seems crystal clear why they work so well. In a masterful way, they manage to evoke in the reader these universally understood and elementary human emotions, and they aren’t dallying around getting down to business, either: fear, sadness, and surprise (and in the case of “The Lottery” you can probably throw in disgust, as well). Both stories pack a wallop in the emotional department, leaving the reader completely overwhelmed and breathless with emotion. That’s why they work, and that’s why they continue to be read and loved and studied and discussed to this day. Plain and simple.

Some people may argue that fiction can also make you think and be successful, and I have no argument there . . . except to say that stories that engage your mind in all likelihood engaged your heart first. After all, if you are not emotionally invested in a fictional story, would you invest yourself mentally in it? If you are looking for cut-and-dried, objective information, go read nonfiction! There are thousands of fine books in this category written and published each year, on subjects as diverse as wildlife, space exploration, world wars, nutrition, human sexuality, international travel, computer programming, you name it. Nothing wrong with any of them. But if you are looking to experience those elementary, raw emotions that make us human, look for good fiction!

In my story “Letters From Tokyo” (so grateful to editor Janet Hutchings for accepting it for publication in EQMM; talk about happiness!) I strove to evoke in the reader the following emotions: love and pride for one’s child (happiness), longing for said child that hasn’t returned home in ages (sadness), worry about losing said child forever (fear), loneliness and slowly dawning realization of one’s own approaching demise (sadness and fear), and hope that everything will turn out all right in the end (desire for happiness). The story incorporates elements of mystery, suspense, and crime, but more than anything else, it tries to capture the depth of these genuine, heartfelt emotions. I hope you like it, dear reader.

In conclusion, let me reiterate once again how essential and all-important to us those emotions are in our experience and journey as human beings. So much so that we come back looking for them again and again and again … like a junkie looking for his next fix, almost. And whenever readers—irrespective of age, gender, class, wealth, cultural or ethnic background—pick up a new novel or a collection of short stories, I have an idea that they do it precisely with this hope. They want to be taken away and think new thoughts, gain new insights, and vicariously experience new things, but above all, they want to be made to feel those elementary and powerful human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and/or disgust. And it is the fiction writer’s job—if he or she is to be successful—to not leave them disappointed . . . or worse, indifferent.