Executive Editor Matt Sutherland Interviews L. Mark Weeks, Author of Bottled Lightning

In our offices, we’re always a bit stunned to come across a great debut novel because we know how difficult it is to assemble the many working parts—plot, characters, setting, etc.—into a cohesive and compelling story. When the feat is achieved by a writer from outside the MFA writing programs/writers workshop pipeline, consider us triply impressed.

Which brings us to L. Mark Weeks, a bilingual corporate attorney with lengthy experience at a top law firm in Japan, who somehow found the time and mustered the skill to write Bottled Lightning, his superb thriller set in Tokyo.

We know lawyers are usually good with the pen, but come on.

Foreword’s Executive Editor Matt Sutherland is always game for a high level conversation and he jumped at the chance to engage with Mark about powerful motorcycles, his years in Tokyo, radical renewable energy ideas, tarpon fishing with a fly rod, and all manner of other topics.

In addition to his work as a corporate attorney for a top international law firm, Torn is a motorcycle enthusiast, who regularly careens his powerful BMW around the expressways of Tokyo with his equally crazy mate, Mak. Both the racing and the descriptions of Tokyo leave no doubt about your familiarity with bikes and the city. Please give us a sense of why and how you are, as you say, “uniquely qualified to write this international legal thriller,” based in Japan.

From 30,000 feet, I am uniquely qualified to write Bottled Lightning because I have spent more than half of my adult life living, studying, working, and practicing law—representing cutting edge technology companies, including renewable energy companies—in Japan and, like Torn and Saya, the two main characters, my son is biracial and bilingual. I also have many friends with biracial children. So I understand, to a certain extent, how people of mixed race (at least people who have white American and Japanese parents, and in the case of one friend, white French and Japanese parents) in both Japan and the US feel and the advantages and disadvantages of being biracial, bilingual, and bicultural. I also benefitted from their feedback when I had them read an early version of the manuscript.

The motorcycle parts of the story, many of which ended up on the editing room floor—one of my editor’s commented, “less motorcycle fetishness” (laughs)—are based on my experiences riding motorcycles in Japan. I started riding a 50cc bike when I was in college in Japan, but motorcycle riding, like buying weapons (laughs), often escalates to buying more powerful bikes. Over the years, I’ve had a 250cc Yamaha dirt bike, a 400cc Honda CBX, a 650cc Yamaha Special, a 1600cc Kawasaki Vulcan (wow, what a great bike!), and, finally, a 1200cc BMW K 1200 LT (I love this bike!).

I attended a university in the Tokyo suburbs, but in the evenings I worked downtown teaching English and debate and translating. I often drove my Honda CBX or Yamaha Special to work after class. The return ride late at night frequently turned into an impromptu race, which is really stupid (laughs), with other riders on the streets of Tokyo. The weaving in and out of traffic and lane splitting—and sometimes driving on the sidewalk—were an unbelievable rush. The street racers never spoke or even really acknowledged each other when we were waiting at lights, but more than once when one of the anonymous racers would reach their turn-off for home, they would honk and nod or salute the other riders. Sometimes, we found ourselves running from patrol cars trying to pull us over. But the cops usually got stuck in car traffic we could weave through. When I look back on it now, it’s amazing to me that I got out unscathed and with no criminal record. (laughs)

After moving back to Japan to run Orrick’s Tokyo office, I bought a BMW and cruised the streets and expressways and went on trips in the mountains with a tattooed Harley-riding friend.

Japan is the perfect country for motorcycle riding because the roads are good, it has countless well maintained beautiful winding mountain and ocean-side roads, the riders are good because much training and passage of a rigorous road test are required to get a large bike motorcycle license, and car drivers are taught to look out for motorcyclists.

Torn’s most important client is Raijin Clean and its founder, Saya Laura Brooks. Saya has developed game-changing technology that generates lightning and harnesses the power to produce bountiful clean energy. Of course, such an invention threatens to upend energy production around the globe, which makes her persona non grata to more than a few oil and gas producers. Aside from the sophistication of the legal and patent guidance Torn provides Raijin, you write convincingly about the lightning technology, all but making it sound realistic. Where did you conjure up the idea? Is there some there there to energy sourced from a lightning generating machine?

Raijin Clean is definitely Torn’s most interesting client, but it’s not Torn’s biggest client from a revenue standpoint. For lawyers, often times your favorite or most intriguing client is not necessarily your most profitable.

Thank you for your kind words about the technology. One of my energy partners, who read an early draft of the manuscript, asked me if the technology was real. That’s when I knew that I had described something believable.

Alas, it’s all made up—at least for now. My research revealed some ideas about capturing naturally occurring lightning in places such as Florida, which I believe has the most lightning strikes in the United States, but I didn’t find any discussion of making lightning-on-demand for the purpose of creating energy that could be used on a large scale.

The genesis of the technology in Bottled Lightning was my desire to use an intriguing technology as a hook. I considered pharmaceuticals and energy because I had done work in both industries, including work for biotech companies developing monoclonal antibody treatments for various cancers and battery, wind, and nuclear companies. While still undecided, I found myself lying on the bottom of a tiny flats skiff in the Florida Everglades as lightning bolts from a thunder storm that had overtaken us dropped all around. The bolts were so close we could hear the thunder and see the lightning bolt flash, including a flash under water, at the same time. Terrifying. I was sure our skiff, and we with it, were going to be blown apart at any moment, our bodies to become food for sharks and American saltwater crocodiles, with only our cars in the parking lot remaining to indicate our last location. At the same time, I was in awe of the raw power being created.

After returning home, my research indicated that, while science understands the theory of how lightning is generated, it doesn’t know exactly how the mechanics work. This gave me a gray area in which to develop a story about Saya figuring out the mechanics and how to replicate them on demand. I then added some ideas I had studied about perpetual motion machines using magnets—which most scientists in the field probably consider quackery—and some knowledge of battery technology. And voila!, a new bleeding-edge renewable energy technology!

Cultured and sophisticated, with a Zen-inspired approach to life, Torn’s love life is a mess. He’s a lying, duplicitous, sex hound—which, as he’s well aware, speaks to any number of insecurities. Can you talk about finding that right balance when creating the flawed, albeit likable and compelling protagonist Torn?

Yes, lying, duplicitous sex hound! Exactly right … but with a conscience, and he’s charming and sexy and a brilliantly creative lawyer and lover of adventure who cares deeply about his family and his clients. He’s also always trying to please. And he isn’t James Bond. He can’t just brush women aside without it causing him great pain. If he’s going to be a cad, it would’ve been easier for him to just be a roguish cad. But he can’t, because, as dysfunctional as he is, he is not a psychopath. He has a soul.

Balance? I’m not sure I found it, but thank you for giving Torn and me the benefit of the doubt. When I sat down to write the story, I had in mind an international man of mystery character like 007 or Nicholai Hel from Trevanian’s Shibumi, but such a robotic character seemed barely two dimensional, and an emotionless superhero didn’t ring true. But when Torn started interacting with the other characters, he came into his own as a fully formed and all-too-human character. Then, I had to develop his back story to explain why he is who he is. Writing biographies for Torn and each of the other characters helped me immensely with character development.

Torn and Saya frequently express their struggles with being half Japanese, and never quite fitting in, whether in Japan, the States, or elsewhere. Mak, a Japanese-American living in Japan, describes similar feelings about being on the outside looking in, whether he’s in Japan or the US. Why did you decide to write about such characters? Is there something uniquely difficult and unsettling about being half Japanese or being of Japanese descent living in Japan? How does Japanese society treat citizens who have some but not only Japanese blood or Japanese blood but a different upbringing?

Instead of the stereotypical American hero story of white guy goes to mysterious Asia, learns special skills, becomes a superhero, gets the submissive and swooning girl, and conquers all, I wanted something more nuanced that reflected modern Japan and the people living there, including native Japanese, non-Japanese, biracial people, and Japanese Americans living in Japan and living between the two countries and cultures of Japan and the US. I also wanted to paint a Blade Runner-like picture of how intermingled Japanese and US cultures have become despite the huge differences.

As an aside, I note that the world of increasing intermingling between US and Japanese cultures that I had the good fortune to enjoy since the 1970s is sliding backwards as both the US and Japan become more isolationists and, in particular, as fewer young Japanese than at any time since World War II desire to study or work abroad.

My son, whose mother is Japanese, and who was raised in both Japan and the US, was my inspiration for Torn and Saya. He never quite fit in at either Japanese or US schools and had a small group of friends he described as misfits. Interestingly, when he attended kindergarten and first and second grade in Japan, the school treated him as any other Japanese pupil, expecting the same things. But when he started school in the US, they wanted to classify him as having a learning disability because, although his math scores were very high, he struggled with English reading comprehension. I had to fight the school to keep him out of an English as a Second Language class, explaining that bilingual kids often lag behind their peers at first because they are learning two completely different languages at the same time, but quickly catch up and often exceed the reading levels of their monolingual peers, which is exactly what happened.

I think there is always an element of being on the outside looking in when you’re in the minority. Historically, after WWII, many biracial children in Japan became entertainers envied for their exotic looks, taller statures, language skills, and ability to move in circles outside of Japan. But they were never really accepted as Japanese. I note that mixed race children of Japanese and white parents historically benefitted more from their status as “half” than, for example, children of Japanese and Korean or Japanese and Chinese parents. Also, it’s my impression that in the decades immediately following WWII, children of Japanese and black parents also were not accepted as much as someone like Naomi Osaka is today. As they say, it’s complicated.

I personally think that Japan is much better now at assimilating all types of people not considered traditional Japanese than when I first lived there in the late 1970s. Also, the US has its own checkered history of treating biracial people, including anti-miscegenation laws in many states that banned marriage between people of different races. Such laws were in existence in many US states as recently as 1967, when they were finally struck down by the US Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.

Although Mak is Japanese American, and not half, he was still part of a small minority when growing up in the US and not really Japanese when in Japan, because he’s born and raised in the US and not a native Japanese speaker. In the US, Japanese Americans were interned during World War II despite having US citizenship, and, even after the war, were treated as second class citizens. And yet, in their ancestral homeland of Japan, they’re not viewed as Japanese and generally do not view themselves as such.

The point is that I believe these issues made for more nuanced and interesting characters.

Mak, in addition to being Torn’s best friend, is Torn’s alter ego, conscience, and moral compass. Mak is also a retired CIA and FBI agent who now works in the private sector doing delicate work for powerful clients like Torn, so Mak plays quite an important, best-supporting-actor role in Bottled Lightning. Please talk about how his character came to be over the course of writing the novel?

Yes, Mak is to Torn what Spock and Dr. McCoy were to Captain Kirk. (laughs)

Like most of the characters in Bottled Lighting, creating Mak was an iterative process. I started with the premise that Torn needed counterbalance from, as you say, an alter ego. And I had the perfect person in mind as a model. The Harley-riding tattooed friend I mentioned previously is a Russian Jew who immigrated to the US with his family at the age of twelve during the Reagan administration. Remember, at the time, thanks to Reagan’s rhetoric, many Americans viewed Russia as the “Great Satan.” So he struggled to find his place in early 1980s America and sought refuge in music, motorcycle riding, and software development.

I met him in Japan where he worked as an IT specialist and played bass in a popular band. Multi-lingual, including English, Russian, and Japanese, smart as a whip, and hilarious, we soon became fast friends and motorcycle buddies. He told me that at one point the CIA had tried to recruit him. So I thought he would be the perfect person on which to base Mak. After I wrote the manuscript, an early beta reader from Hawaii suggested making the character Japanese American, which resonated with me.

As she and Torn negotiate with venture capitalists, governmental orgs, and various corporations to raise much needed capital for Raijin Clean, Saya gradually comes to understand how transformative her technology could be for an endangered planet. Consequently, they strategize over the best way to both preserve her ability to profit off the invention but also to put it into the public domain for the benefit of mankind. Torn, as it turns out, provided Saya with many different options to achieve her goals. Well, sir, based on Torn’s insider, highly complex advice, you showed your cards as a successful corporate attorney. Why was it so important to you to bring such expertise to this story?

Believe it or not, my editors made me cut a lot of the detail because they said it bogged down the pacing. Part of the answer to your question is to write what you know and I had practiced law in the trenches so long that I understood those issues and found them interesting in the hypothetical context of a technology startup founder fearing for their life and wondering what would happen to their life’s work if someone murdered them.

Also, as a lawyer, getting the facts right is the first step to good lawyering. To paraphrase writer John McPhee, author of Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, getting the facts right is as important in fiction as it is in non-fiction. Also, while the casual reader may not notice mistakes, patent experts would know if I got the law wrong on patents; scientists would know if I got anything wrong with respect to lightning, magnets, or batteries; sophisticated corporate types would know if I got the corporate and securities stuff wrong, etc.

Another part of the answer is that I introduced the different individuals, underworld characters, government organizations, and corporations, including the Japanese, Russian, and Chinese corporations, into the story because I wanted readers to understand that the possible entrenched energy interests that would be adversely affected by Saya’s lightning invention is extremely broad, meaning the list of possible antagonists is very long, and, in fact, there could be more than one.

Also, without spoiling the plot, I used the rubric of patent law to do more than just protect Saya’s intellectual property rights in her invention. It ends up helping her achieve a much broader and more important goal.

Finally, as important as it is to get the facts right, it’s also important to leave a lot of white space for the reader to fill in with their imagination, and I tried to do that as much as possible while being true to the subject matter. It’s a balancing act. Reading is not nearly as much fun without those white spaces. Readers often think a book is better than the movie, because the movie doesn’t match the vivid world their imaginations created by filling in the empty space.

The customs and traditions of Japanese society are present on nearly every page of the book. A Buddhist funeral ceremony was depicted in elaborate detail, for example, how to show appropriate respect to the deities in a shrine, intricate descriptions of Tokyo architecture, fashion, food, and so much more color the story. (As an aside, I’ve been fortunate to visit Japan a handful of times and wouldn’t hesitate to call it the most cultured place I’ve ever been.) Will you talk about your connection to the country and its people?

Japan and its culture is a character in the book, not just the setting. (And, like you, it is the most cultured place I have ever been.) I have had a 44-year relationship with Japan and have lived more than half of my adult life there. But I am still an outsider and always will be. Unlike the US, where anyone can become an American, because of Japan’s history and culture, I don’t believe it is possible for a non-Japanese person to become truly Japanese. To take an extreme example, even if you’re an American whose ancestors are from Japan, aka, a Japanese-American, you’ll never be fully Japanese in Japan. That is not a criticism of a country I adore. It’s merely an observation.

Also, being an outsider has its advantages. It makes you more observant and objective about the country and culture in which you’re living and the languages you’re speaking. It’s also a great point of comparison for thinking about the United States specifically, and the West generally, because Japan’s history, language, and culture are so different from that of the US, where I was born and raised until the age of sixteen, and the broader Western world.

For example, Japan is not a Judeo-Christian nation. The spiritual foundations of Japan are Shintoism, a polytheistic religion at the heart of which is ancestor worship, and Buddhism, which at base is more philosophy than religion, although different sects have turned it into a religion. Also, there was very little nexus between Japan and the Western world until the mid-19th century.

In fact, around the same time the British defeated the Spanish Armada and decided to conquer the world, Japan decided to close its doors to the world for 260 years after suffering defeats in Korea and becoming concerned about being colonized by Europeans, particularly the Spanish and Portuguese. Because of this isolation and the lack of successful invasions of Japan until a brief invasion by the US at the end of World War II, much of Japanese history and culture (and many of the subcultures and dialects that developed because of Japan’s feudalistic past) developed independently of the West. For example, the traditional holidays are all very different from those in the West and arise out of a very different history and way of thinking not influenced by Judeo-Christian or Greek philosophy and thought.

Living and working in Japan and speaking Japanese has made me more objective about the strengths and short comings of both Japan and the US and helps me to appreciate more the wonderful things about both countries. My experience living in Japan also fundamentally broadened and deepened my palate. I can eat anything! And it has made me more analytical and objective when thinking about religion and philosophy. I hope that this objectivity has resulted in a picture of Japan and the characters in the book that has depth and is multifaceted.

Having practiced law in Japan for many years, I know police, prosecutors, and lawyers in Japan. A former Japanese prosecutor and a former judge both practice in our Tokyo office. I have been to several criminal and civil legal proceedings in Japan and have helped American citizens arrested in Japan. I have also studied Japanese criminal law and procedure. Moreover, I was living in Japan when Carlos Ghosn, the former CEO of Nissan and Renault, spectacularly escaped to Lebanon from house arrest in Tokyo while awaiting trial, and I know a judge involved in that case.

With respect to the wake and funeral scenes, I have lived in Japan long enough to have attended funerals there. They are very different from funeral rites in the US. For better or for worse, I have lived long enough to have attended funerals in both countries, which makes comparison easy. The experience in Japan is much more visceral, in your face, and less antiseptic and distant than they often are in the US.

I have also lived through numerous earthquakes and their aftermaths in Japan, including the big one in 2011 that caused the giant tsunami and Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. That aided me in writing one of the scenes in the book.

All of these things influenced what to write about and how, including about Japan’s criminal justice system and earthquakes. I hope that my knowledge of, and experiences living in, Japan and the US have helped me describe more clearly the differences between Japan and the US, and between Japanese and Americans, and also the world of biracial people caught in between.

Have we heard the last of Torn and Saya, Mak and Mayumi? Are you currently working on another book? What’s next for you?

Good questions. I did not intend to write a series or a sequel when writing Bottled Lighting. But, fortuitously, the story ended in a way that has set it up for a sequel and many readers have been demanding one. I also love the characters.

Writing a series is a tried and true business model in book publishing, probably because it is a great way to develop and cultivate an audience and, therefore, sell more books. Two of my author friends have written series; one in the legal thriller genre and one in the science fiction/fantasy genre. However, I haven’t considered doing that because, at this stage of my life, I want to write what feels the most compelling to me.

I am currently working on a novel about tarpon fly fishing tournaments. It’s another story based on my personal experiences fly fishing for tarpon in the Florida Keys and Everglades, but it’s not even in the same genre as Bottled Lightning, which is a high-tech or Eco-SciFi international legal thriller. My current project is contemporary fiction in the nature subgenre, which probably means nothing to anyone but a book nerd.

At the same time, I continue to noodle on an outline for a sequel to Bottled Lightning.

Matt Sutherland
April 19, 2023

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