Postscript

Although they’re all but dead as a genre, western movies were loved almost as much in Japan as they were in America. Before and after World War II, from the 1930s through the end of the 1950s, a great many masterpieces were made, but being born in 1949, I didn’t get to see them in the theater.

As the sixties began, westerns were losing steam. However, 1960s hits The Alamo and The Magnificent Seven showed that westerns could still bring in big money! Taking that into account, the movie companies rolled out their old masterpieces again. The first of these was director John Ford’s 1939 film Stagecoach, the next 1946’s My Darling Clementine, and finally there was 1953’s Shane. Living out in the boondocks, I went all the way into Tokyo to see them in the theater, and after that I made a point of seeing every single western that was showing.

Horror movies are another film genre that I love, and thanks to advances in special effects they even now enjoy great popularity, but they lack a backbone in history. Since westerns are intimately linked to the history of the westward expansion, related books were published one after another, and I bought all of them I could find. As a result, I was lousy at world history and Japanese history, but I turned into this weird little student who was well versed in American history from 1830 to 1890—so long as it took place out West during the good old days of the westward expansion. In our rustic junior high and high school, I’d say things like “You could swap ammo back and forth between the Winchester Model 73 and the Colt Frontier” or “Some ridiculous books say that Wyatt Earp used a Buntline Special with an eighteen-inch barrel during the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but it was really only twelve inches long.” My equally rustic classmates would just give me puzzled looks.

So that’s how I came to be a huge fan of westerns, and as a writer I’ve penned a few. This book, Bedeviled Stagecoach, is one of them. To be honest, the basic idea comes from the film Stagecoach I mentioned earlier. You can enjoy the book without knowing anything about the movie, but those who’ve seen Stagecoach should find this interesting. The Noble servant being transported, the sheriff guarding him, the mysterious passengers, the unique Frontier threats that lay ahead, and the henchmen the Noble sends to retrieve his man—I think you’ll be able to see at a glance that this is filled with the kind of excitement to be found not just in a western, but in Stagecoach in particular. The setting is the very same Frontier. But I wouldn’t really call it a western novel. I hope, rather, that the reader will find it to be a western movie projected upon the screen of their heart.

Hideyuki Kikuchi

February 23, 2017

While watching Stagecoach (1939)