POSTSCRIPT
POSTSCRIPT
-
This is my first new postscript for the English editions of my books.
I’d like to thank my readers in America and elsewhere for supporting D for so long. Due, no doubt, to the two animated features, sales of the novels have been good, and the author is overjoyed. I can’t sleep with my feet toward the anime directors. (According to Japanese custom, sleeping with your feet facing someone you are indebted to means you aren’t grateful to them. Well, since I don’t know where either of them lives, I may actually have my feet pointed toward them . . . )
I’ve loved horror and sci-fi since I was a kid, and I never missed one of these kinds of films when they were showing in my hometown (which was a desolate port town like Lovecraft’s Innsmouth.) Even when I had a fever of about a hundred and four, I acted perfectly fine in front of my parents, and, once I was outside, I staggered over to the movie theater. (The film was The Brides of Dracula.) Hammer’s The Revenge of Frankenstein was showing on the same bill with a rather erotic French film, and the woman at the ticket booth said to me, “For a kid, you’ve come to see a pretty lewd movie.” But I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about and went right on in. Unfortunately, the erotic film proved more interesting. (Laughs.)
As I was born in 1949, what left the strongest impression on me were the Hammer horror films from England. In particular, I’ll never forget the impact Horror of Dracula had on me when I saw it. Gripped by the fearsomeness of Count Dracula as portrayed by Christopher Lee, every night I slept with a cross fashioned from a pair of chopsticks by my pillow.
Mr. Lee and Peter Cushing, who played the part of Van Helsing, became my favorite stars. Though I never did get a chance to meet Mr. Cushing, about ten years ago I met Mr. Lee and got his autograph when he came to Japan for the Tokyo Fantastic Film Festival. Wow, was he huge! (I’m not quite five foot seven.)
But the first time I ever saw Dracula and Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, mad doctors, and the rest was in a horror/comedy production by Universal called Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Made in 1948, the film was screened in Japan in 1956.
All of the monsters who were to decide my future were in this one film. How lucky could you get? I think I was some-how fated to write about them. And the way I completely missed Horror of Dracula the first time it showed in my home-town but caught it when it came back for another showing a few years later was nothing short of miraculous. Once again, it was destiny.
This is how the hero known as Vampire Hunter D came to be. I was thirty-three when I gave life to him, and I continue writing about his adventures twenty-two years later. Not only in novels now, he’s spread to animation and games, and plans for his Hollywood debut and an American comic version are progressing nicely. However, more than anything, it pleases me that the novels have found acceptance and an audience with you.
I’m quite proud of Tale of the Dead Town and the action I penned as D does battle with the Nobility against the wondrous backdrop of a floating city. Please sit back and enjoy it, just as you’d watch a scary, fun, and thrilling horror/action movie.
Until we meet again. From under distant Japanese skies, to all my readers abroad.
-
Hideyuki Kikuchi
October 14, 2005,
watching Horror of Dracula