Why Kamigoe?

You’ll have no doubt noticed by now that I have titled this series Kamigoe, which is Japanese for, roughly, To Surpass God. Ostensibly, one would think it is about the literal kami that the main characters incarnate throughout this work, but that’s only part of it.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that this series is as much about the interpersonal relationships in our lives as it is about grand historical fantasy epics and struggles between the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, humans and demons.

But it’s much more than that.

I first came up with the idea for this series back in 2012. At the time, it was a different series in my head, and no matter how many times I’d pick it up and write it over the years, none of the incarnations ever felt right. A few years back, my relationship with my father shifted for the better. Though we’ve sometimes had a turbulent relationship, it has grown into a genuinely deep one between father and son.

That was when this series started to click for me, and I knew the kind of story I wanted to tell with it. I spent a few years plotting, planning, and plugging away slowly. I redeveloped the relationships among several father-son pairs and contrasted them: Munetada and Yu, Takahiko and Mitsutaka, Daimaru and his own father, and many more.

Then last year, my grandfather fell ill. He suffered a stroke just before Mother’s Day, and my family was shaken pretty deeply by it. There was hope—or perhaps denial—at first that he might pull through. Even if he’d never be the same again, being 87 years old, we all had some hope he could recover and live on just a bit longer. That was not to be.

I would spend Saturday afternoons in the hospital with him, and though we couldn’t speak, because of the nature of his stroke, I would sit there with my wife at his bedside and be with him. When he was asleep, I would pass the time writing and working on this book.

In the end, he would pass, and I would let this book sit for a few months as my family recovered. In the fall of last year, I felt ready to tackle this book again, which I’ve dedicated to his memory.

It’s no secret that my grandfather meant a lot to me, just as my father means a lot to me. I like to think I share some similarities with both of them, and though I still have my father in my life, now that my grandfather is gone, I find myself clinging to any similarities we had in an attempt to keep him close.

What does that have to do with the title of this series?

This is as much a story about the literal gods as it is about the gods we create for ourselves in our daily lives. Cousins, uncles, aunts, siblings, parents, grandparents; indeed, as we look up to these people in our lives, we come to make gods out of them. We raise them up and hold them to a higher standard. We make them the ideal that we strive to become. We emulate them and live in their example. Take on their likes and dislikes and strive to impress and emulate them. We hold them close and inevitably miss them terribly when they’re gone. Sometimes we do their memory justice, and sometimes, in the pursuit of that, we fail terribly. Because we’re human, and that is part of the human condition.

Kamigoe speaks as much to the natural human desire to try to surpass and uphold the gods of our own creation as it does to surpassing and embodying the literal gods in which we place our faith.