POSTSCRIPT

How did you enjoy this D novel? It’s hard to believe we’re already up to the sixth book. Actually, 6 is my lucky number, and if you put two more 6’s after that, you wind up with The Omen. (Laughs) Of course, if it’d get me that kind of power, I wouldn’t mind putting those extra 6’s on there. (Laughs)

Well, as this is my third new postscript in a row, I thought I might talk about how the Vampire Hunter D series came to be. My debut as a novelist, Demon City (Shinjuku),was published in September of 1982, and because it sold fairly well, the publisher asked me to get to work on another novel right away. At the time, something about vampires popped into my head as the prime book candidate—although it would be more accurate to say that I had wanted to do a story about vampires for my first book. The reason I ended up going with something else first was because the theme of vampires seemed to be much too specialized, and, up until that time, there really hadn’t been a book intended for a juvenile audience that dealt with such grotesque material. Most likely, a horror tale written to illustrate the terror of the protagonist as he or she is menaced by supernatural forces would’ve been poorly received by young readers (males in particular). In order to avoid that pitfall, I introduced action into my debut novel. It is an indispensable element in stories for younger readers, and since I’d always liked action myself, it was almost inevitable that I’d wind up writing books like this. What’s more, I decided to include more elements of science fiction in my new novel. The reason for this should be obvious: young people seem to prefer sci-fi to horror. (Although the reception horror receives may differ in this respect between Japan and America.) At that time, no one here had written a novel like Demon City. It proved to be the birth of what I later termed “horror action.” Fortunately, it got results—and because the sales were good, the editorial staff had no complaints when I said I wanted to go with vampires.

Basically, I grew up watching movies about Japanese ghost stories; Hammer Films from England like Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, and Universal offerings from America such as Dracula and Frankenstein. I had but one complaint about monster movies, and a wish to see it remedied. I always thought, “Instead of having these monsters and ghosts just beating the hell out of everybody non-stop, wouldn’t it be great if there was a hero who had even greater strength than they did?” After all, who likes losing all the time? To be perfectly honest, my novels take a lot from the best points of horror movies. The setting of Demon City, where Shinjuku has been cut off from the rest of Tokyo by a massive earthquake, is very similar to that of the John Carpenter film Escape from New York and the Japanese manga Violence Jack. Also, the protagonist of Vampire Hunter D is reminiscent of the titular character of the Hammer Films movie Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (though D is about ten thousand times more handsome than the actor who played the lead in that movie (laughs)). And D’s also naturally patterned after the leading character of the classic Horror of Dracula, who scared the life out of me when I was nine or ten—Count Dracula, as portrayed by Christopher Lee. Despite the fact that I found Count Dracula to be a creature that should obviously be destroyed, and regardless of the fact that at the time I was more enthralled with Peter Cushing’s role of Van Helsing than I was with the vampire he kills, the utter coolness of Count Dracula dressed in black and standing at the entrance to some beautiful woman’s room was something I couldn’t overlook simply because he was the villain—it had a great impact on me. D’s hallmarks—being distant, tall, and garbed in black—were all traits borrowed from Lee’s Dracula. In other words, you could say D is like Horror of Dracula embracing the trappings of Captain Kronos.

Having the hero be a man of peerless beauty wasn’t actually a matter of my own personal tastes, nor was it a ploy to secure female readers—it was to make his coolness perfect and complete. Further-more, D is burdened with the fate of being a dhampir—a human/vampire half-breed. Until now, I’ve always said the reason for this was because a purely human hero would’ve been boring, and also because having D be both human and vampire—but shunned by both sides—only served to intensify his tragic nature. But the simple truth is that I really wanted to try and give him some of the wonderful vampire characteristics from Lee’s excellent portrayal of Dracula. And that’s how D was born.

Next time, I’ll try to touch on D’s world and his partner after a fashion, “the left hand.”

Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane is one of the great books in the series as far as the color and development of the cast of characters are concerned. In particular, the two heavies were my favorite characters, and I still regret only using them in this one volume—it seems like such a waste. Incidentally, there’s a scene near the end that’s borrowed from a certain American movie, and I wonder if my English-speaking readers will know what film that is. No one in Japan ever caught it.

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Hideyuki Kikuchi

June 28, 2006

while watching Billy the Kid versus Dracula