Books Right Now Presents:
I’m so excited to feature Yume Kitasei on Books Right Now! I’m a huge fan of her climate fiction novel, Saltcrop, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to interview her.
Intro
RD: For anyone who hasn’t read Saltcrop yet, how would you describe your book in one or two sentences?
YK: It’s a climate dystopian novel about two sisters who sail across the ocean in search of their missing sister. It is comparable to Wild Dark Shore or Station 11.
A Deep Dive into Saltcrop
RD: What inspired you to write Saltcrop?
YK: I knew I wanted to write a book about sailing at some point and specifically sailing across the ocean, which is something that’s always just fascinated me. We used to spend summers with my grandparents in a very small town on Rhode Island, and we did their community sailing camp. We were in these very small sailboats, and we would go out to the mouth of the ocean and get to the edge where the big swells start to form. That really just caught my imagination and is something that I never let go of. I also had this idea that I wanted to write something dystopian. Those two things just married together pretty well.
I wanted to write about sisters because I have sisters, and I’m very interested in stories that explore different kinds of relationships beyond just romantic ones. My first two books are very much about friendship, and I wanted to write something about family.
RD: What did your research and drafting process look like for this book?
YK: My research process is multi-pronged. I should also say that I try to do a zero draft first before I do too much research because I think that it’s good for the story to hang together and make sense narratively. It also gives you a little bit more discipline about what you’re actually going to research.
So once I have a zero draft down, basically just a word vomit and an outline, I go to the library, and I start pulling books off the shelf. I’m very fortunate to live near the Central Library, which is the biggest library in all of Brooklyn. I go there, browse through their non-fiction section, and pull books off the shelf. I’ll read through a large stack of books.
I also reach out to people online who are experts. In this case, I found a young woman who is a solo sailor in Arctic Norway, which if you’ve read the book you obviously know is very relevant. She was very kind and willing to answer lots of questions.
There’s also a science fiction author named Tobias Buckell who grew up sailing and is a very proficient sailor. When I had to figure out the action scenes in this book, he was very kind, gave me an hour, and we blocked it out. He actually wrote a book called Arctic Rising, which is a really fun thriller set in the Arctic on boats. He was very helpful when working through my book!
I also watch a lot of YouTube videos. The best thing about this current age is that so many people vlog their lives. They’ll give you a tour of their boat and explain how they modified it. I went on sites and looked up boats that were being sold, and what the materials were. I did a lot of Internet-based research as well.
RD: How did you approach writing the relationships between the three sisters?
YK: That was such a fun part of writing this book. In some ways, you’re not writing a book about three people and their relationship to each other, you’re writing about six people and their relationship to each other. There’s the person that they are now, and the person that they were before. One of the funny things about family is that I think a lot of times your relationship is with the person they were before and not the person they are now.
There’s a good degree of the story that deals with the idea of, you knew that person when they were young, and that’s sort of how they’ve been solidified in your mind. You’re sort of getting to know them as an adult. You have to sort of shed your memory of who they were a little bit in order to accept who they are now.
You see that in the flashbacks in the books, each sister remembers formative moments of their childhood in different ways. You get to see the same scenes several times over and realize that the way that one sister viewed it was not the full picture or accurate picture. That’s because, when you go through life, your origin story is based on very specific assumptions about things that you experienced, but you yourself are a very unreliable narrator. It’s possible that the person that you have become is based on something that was maybe not an accurate understanding of what happened.
RD: Why did you decide to tell the story of Saltcrop through three POVs?
YK: So people have asked me this question before. I looked back at the outline, and I don’t think that was actually how I intended to write it. At the beginning, I think it was meant to be just third person. What happened was I got to a certain point, which I won’t say because I think that’s a tiny spoiler, but I got to the place where, you know, and I got stuck.
I couldn’t figure out what to do so I tried writing in second person. I switched to second person from the second sister’s point of view and all of a sudden it just flowed. The rest of the book was very easy to write after that. Sometimes you yourself don’t really consciously know what the story needs, and your subconscious is a little bit ahead of where you are. When you’re on the right track, you can feel it in your breastbone because somehow, suddenly, it’s very easy to write.
RD: What’s one theme or message you’d like to ensure readers to take away from your book?
YK: I don’t want people to take away that the book is just a bleak indictment of where we are with climate change because I think it’ll be very easy to feel that way, especially in the first half of the book. I mean, I often do feel very bleak about where we are, what we haven’t done, and what we have left to do. I was feeling something like despair, and I was trying to find my reason for hope. The way that I wrote the book is intended to capture that nugget of hope and how you can get through what feels like a very dark world and dark time and where you can find your light.
RD: What do you think would be Nora’s theme song?
YK: When I write, I tend to collect songs that sort of seem to fit the books that I’m writing. There’s a song somebody sent to me while I was writing that I listened to, and I thought was just a really great match for the book in general called Rain Clouds by The Arcadian Wild.
RD: If Nora were across from you right now, what advice would you give her?
YK: I think that my advice is to let your sisters be the adults they’ve grown up to become. At some point you have to let them grow and do their own thing, even if that unfortunately means that they’re no longer in the same place as you, both metaphorically and geographically.
Meet the Storyteller
RD: What were your favorite books growing up?
YK: I read a lot of different things growing up: fantasy, science fiction, but then also mystery like Agatha Christie novels. I read a lot of lit fic and non-fiction in high school. So I read almost everything. I think that probably comes across in my writing, which is cross-genre, because I’m borrowing a lot of elements from a lot of different genres.
RD: How do your culture and your identity influence your writing?
YK: I think part of the reason why I’m drawn to writing cross-genre is probably because of my own identity and how I deeply resist being put in a single box. I am Japanese-American, and I consider myself sort of between two cultures in terms of how I was raised. So a lot of times my characters are mixed or of multiple cultures in different ways.
I’m often drawn to stories like that where people are sort of in between spaces, and there’s nothing more in-between than a journey story. All three of my stories are journey stories.
RD: Which of the three sisters from your book do you think you are most like?
YK: I’m actually a twin, so it’s not obvious whether I’m Skipper or Carmen. I think that I probably identify more with Carmen. All characters are an amalgamation of bits and pieces of you and just pieces of people that you know. I’m definitely the people person among the sisters and the practical one. I am sometimes sort of resistant to change or less self-driving of change the way that Carmen is, especially at the beginning of the book.
RD: What are your favorite bookstores?
YK: I live in New York, so I love The Strand. Books are Magic in NY, owned by Emma Straub actually handled my pre-orders for me. They’re really, really wonderful, and they have that beautiful mural outside.
Elliot Bay Book Company is a fantastic bookstore. I was really excited to be able to do an event here. Brookline Booksmith in Boston is an amazing bookstore. Easy City Bookshop in Washington, DC was amazing. I also just did an event in Philadelphia with Mavey Books, which is such a fun bookstore. A Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego is also great. They’re a sci-fi fantasy bookstore.
I love independent bookstores because I feel like you walk in and can feel the differences in personality and identity. You can tell the labor of love that has gone into the selection of books that are on the shelves.
RD: What’s the best book you’ve read this year apart from your own?
YK: Oh my gosh, it’s hard for me to pick one. Just off the top of my head, I’ll say a few. I really loved The Library at Hellebore by Cass Khaw. That was an amazingly beautiful and disgusting horror novel. I picture it as dark academia for people who want something a little darker than dark academia.
I just read a non-fiction book that is incredibly bleak but also very important: Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer. It does a deep dive and explains the asylum crisis that we’re in right now.
Also, Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. It was such a weird, wonderful novel. If you like Japanese speculative fiction, it’s in that genre and it’s just so bizarre and surreal and delightful.
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz was really great. I really enjoyed that book. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, which was on the Booker List. I just thought that was such a skillfully done novel. It only has three characters in it, but he somehow manages to make this very spare little book incredibly atmospheric and also incredibly tense.
What’s Next
RD: What’s next for you? I’d love to learn more about any other projects you may be working on.
YK: I have a fourth book that is out in 2027 and is due to my editor in April 2026. It is, I would say, closer to The Deep Sky than it is to Saltcrop. It’s a thriller about five astronauts who were sent to make first contact with aliens ten years ago and have returned to Earth. They are gathered for the reunion when one of them is mysteriously killed.
Thank you for reading! This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full version of this interview is available on Spotify.
More About Yume Kitasei
Yume Kitasei (www.yumekitasei.com) is a Brooklyn-based Japanese and American writer of speculative fiction. She is the author of three novels, THE DEEP SKY, THE STARDUST GRAIL, and SALTCROP. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, Baltimore Review, and Nashville Review.
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