The pleasure was mine. This actually started out from a WWC: "death of a loved one". But then the story changed as I started outlining it, and it kind of got away from me, and well ... here we are.
It's a bit more subdued than I expected it to be. There was a scene I cut out, in fact, where Koji and Hitomi had taken LSD, and Aya tried it as well. At one point in their trip, she tells them she can fly, and says, "Watch!" and does it. But of course by morning Koji and Hitomi are convinced they were just hallucinating. This was a tongue-in-cheek jab at the whole anti-drug hysteria about LSD making people leap off buildings and such because they believe they have the power of flight. I ended up cutting that out because for one, I wasn't really confident on how casual soft drug use would be taken, and second, I couldn't find any concrete research on the effects of LSD on birds. But most of all because it seemed like it would've been a long way to go for that joke, and it would've been shoehorned in there.
But I was sure that Aya would want to try and blend in as well as possible. At the same time, her instincts pull her in the other direction. That's sort of why the harbor played a big part in this.
Incidentally, I lifted the names of every other character from some of my favorite Japanese authors - Hitomi Kanehara, Koji Suzuki, Hideaki Sena, Ryu Murakami, etc.
