Danielle Trussoni: On Waiting 20 Years for the Right Story Vehicle

Danielle Trussoni is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Ancestor, Angelology, and Angelopolis, all New York Times Notable Books, and the memoirs The Fortress and Falling Through the Earth, named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. She writes the monthly horror column for the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Follow her on X (Twitter) and Instagram.

In this interview, Danielle discusses the two decades that went into her desire to write her new thriller, The Puzzle Box, how her experience living in Japan inspired the story, and more.

Name: Danielle Trussoni
Literary agent: Susan Golomb
Book title: The Puzzle Box
Publisher: Random House
Release date: October 8, 2024
Genre/category: Thriller
Previous titles: Angelology; The Puzzle Master
Elevator pitch: An ingenious puzzle solver is called by the Imperial Family of Japan to open the most difficult, dangerous puzzle of his life: the Dragon Box, a 19th century puzzle box that holds secrets that could change the nature of Japan. His attempts to solve it send him on a breakneck race through contemporary Japan and bring startling realizations about the nature of his extraordinary gift.

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The story has many inspirations, but the seed of the novel took root in my 20s, when I lived in Japan for two years as a high school English teacher in a village called Yoshii-machi in Fukuoka prefectures in Kyushu, on the southern-most island Japan. I applied for a job teaching English through the JET program—a program run by the Japanese government that placed native English speakers in Japanese schools so that students would have a chance to hear English on a regular basis. Teachers were placed everywhere in Japan, and I found myself in an extremely rural area. I was assigned “teachers housing,” a small apartment in a building next to a rice paddy. My village had a grocery store, an onsen public bath (which I used all the time because my apartment had no hot running water), a small tea shop, a pachinko parlor, and a few small restaurants. It was 45 minutes by bus to the nearest medium-sized town.

I’d never been to Japan before, and I loved it the minute I arrived. I was 24 years old and struggling to transform notebooks filled with fragments of poetry and story ideas into a living, breathing novel. My primary job was to interact with Japanese kids, and through them I learned an enormous amount about Japanese culture—the kind that you don’t see in movies or in guidebooks.

I taught classes every morning, which left my afternoons free. I would go up to the library and write longhand in notebooks. Over the course of my first year in Japan, I wrote what would become the pages of my first book Falling Through the Earth. One of the teachers heard that I was interested in learning a martial art, and soon I was studying wa-do, a Japanese martial art in the school dojo every afternoon after school. By the time I left, I’d earned a brown belt. I was learning Japanese calligraphy, Ikebana, Japanese language, but more important, I was learning a way of seeing the world that revolved around community, routine, and education. These years were transformative not only because I developed a writing routine and was adopted into a culture I loved, but because in my second year in Japan, my son Alexander was born. By the time I left Japan, I was a writer and a mother.

I’ve wanted to write about Japan for two decades but couldn’t quite find the right vehicle until The Puzzle Box. I felt that it was the perfect way to incorporate what I’d learned in Japan with a propulsive, panoramic story. It also allowed me to incorporate elements of Japanese culture and history that I’d discovered while living in Japan—Shinto religion, the Onna-Bugeisha female samurai, and the Imperial family’s drama of succession

As I mentioned, I’ve wanted to write a novel set in Japan for over 20 years, and my inspirations came from living in Japan. But being inspired and taking an idea and transforming it into a novel is another thing entirely. Perhaps because this idea had been simmering for decades, when the elements came together—the character of Mike Brink, an ingenious puzzle solver, and a Japanese puzzle box as his greatest challenge—the story solidified fast. I wrote out a paragraph description and from that expanded it into an outline. Remarkably, the idea for the novel and the published book are very much of a piece. I’ve written novels in the past that are wildly different from the first idea, but this one seemed to be fully formed in my mind.

I have been astonished by the interest in the setting! So many early readers have told me that they love Japan, have always wanted to go, or have just visited Japan, and that they felt that my novel brought them to places that they had never been before. It really hit home that reading is a form of traveling, and a way to learn about new places.

One part of the novel that I hadn’t fully imagined when I set out to write this novel was the massive amount of interest in the Japanese Imperial Family. I don’t want to give too much of the story away (and of course, I don’t want to spoil the ending!), but there is a controversy surrounding the Imperial Family of Japan, and this became part of my novel.

As with all my novels, I work to create an immersive, mysterious, thrilling experience, one in which readers can simply get lost. If readers escape into another world and feel that my novel has brought them to new places where they’ve experienced things they’d never imagined, then I would be thrilled.

Create a solid writing routine! I write every day, at least when I’m in the “composition” phase of a book, and this consistency shelters me from all sorts of problems—procrastination, writers block, self-doubt. I think it was Picasso who said that “the muse finds me while I’m working.” That’s true for me, as well.