Crime writer Jo Spain told David Hennessy about her new book Never To Be Found inspired by Johatsu, the Japanese phenomenon of people voluntarily leaving their lives.
In Japan there is a chilling phenomenon called Johatsu.
Coming from the Japanese word for evaporation, it is used to describe those who voluntarily disappear from their own lives.
In an honour based society, it is a decision taken by many thousands of people every year.
This phenomenon inspired the new book from bestselling Irish crime writer Jo Spain, Never To Be Found.
In the book Veronica is in the business of helping people disappear.
She has always thought she was helping people in bad situations but when a Detective named Seb comes to her home and tells her a man who helped disappear is a double killer, it turns her world upside down.
Jo Spain is the bestselling author of thirteen thrillers before Never To Be Found, including her three number ones The Trial, The Confession and Dirty Little Secrets.
She was nominated for Irish author of the year in 2024.
Jo is also a full-time screenwriter and has written and produced five series of Harry Wild.
Her other screen projects include The Boy That Never Was and Mis Tape.
Never To Be Found is to be adapted for the screen with Amazon MGM Studios winning a major bidding war.
Jo’s previous novel The Last to Disappear has also just been filmed.
Jo took time to talk to The Irish World.
Tell us how the idea for Never To Be Found came to you? You were intrigued by this Japanese phenomenon Johatsu..
“Yeah, I think the gods just dropped this one in my lap to be honest.
“I read an article about it and the minute I did, it just blew my mind from every aspect: The people who choose to evaporate from their lives, the families that are left behind and then these people in the middle, these night movers.
“100,000 people a year do this in Japan.
“But It really struck a chord with me because my father had died when I was 16.
“He died in a house fire and, because of the nature of his death, we didn’t get to see his body.
“I’ve been speaking about it a lot this week and it really is a trauma.
“When you don’t get to say goodbye, you spend the rest of your life thinking, ‘Are they still out there?’
“When I read about Johatsu I was thinking for the vast majority of those families, their loved one is still out there but they’ve actively chosen to walk away from their lives.
“But as a crime writer I was like, ‘There’s so much potential for crime fiction in this’.”
You must have had to do a deep dive then and find out as much as you could about it all..
“There’s some documentaries that have been made but in Japan they don’t particularly like to talk about it.
“It’s like their suicide, they’ve not quite wrapped their heads around it.
“I became immersed in Japanese culture.
“I was Japanese for like a year.”
Your protagonist Veronica works in this world. I think she help people disappear for honourable reasons as she has tragedy in her past..
“Yeah, I think she thinks, ‘These people are going to go anyway’, and a lot of the time it is from very difficult situations.
“It could be a spouse fleeing an abusive situation and she can understand the reasons why people might want to just walk away from their lives.
“She gets into it for a different reason initially, she wants to find somebody but then she turns it into an actual business.
“It’s morally complex and in the very first chapter in the book somebody turns up and says, ‘You’ve actually evaporated a murderer. You’ve hidden them really well and we need to find them’.
“She’s constantly trying to justify what she’s doing.
“Any kind of flawed character like that appeals to me straight away as a writer.
“You can tell yourself you’ve been doing the right thing all along and when somebody says, ‘No, actually this guy killed not one but two people and you’ve been the means by which he’s managed to flee justice..’ she’s confronted with the reality of what she’s been doing.
“She didn’t dwell in it too much and now it’s just brought to the door.
“That’s the start of her questioning her whole existence and also trying to help find this guy who she’s hidden so well.
“It’s very hard to unknot the knots that put him there.”
It is when the Detective Seb knocks on her door that Veronica’s whole world is changed..
“As a script writer, we kind of get this drilled into us: Storytelling is generally ordinary people in extraordinary situations or extraordinary people in ordinary situations, and that’s how stories work.
“I always like the idea of, like you say, you’re going along in life, everything is fine and then something hits you out of the blue and it’s how you react to that, how you cope with that change in your circumstances that defines a human being and that’s where stories are made.”
Another quality of many of your books is that there is a lie or secret that has been hidden for many years or even decades but comes to a light. A common theme seems to be that the past won’t stay hidden..
“That’s true and I think it’s a particularly English and Irish thing where as families, we get very used to living with secrets.
“I know there’s families up and down the length of Ireland where somebody’s auntie is actually their mother and these are just things that were passed down but the truth generally outs and that is really good fodder for anybody writing novels.
“I think unresolved drama with your parents is a big thing and that obviously features in Never To Be Found.”
I think both Veronica and Seb are haunted and burdened by their pasts..
“Yeah, I can never write one-dimensional characters because it’s just not in me and I don’t think people are one dimensional.
“I always like the idea, whether I’m writing or reading, of characters that have layers that you get to unpeel.
“But the thing with Veronica and Seb is they share traumas and they start to connect over it but, like all good mysteries, we start to realise that the traumas are very different.
“And there’s unreliable narrators in my psychological thrillers which really help and I apologise to readers but they’re necessary to keep the twists going.
“Nobody is ever as they seem which is definitely my trademark.”
Veronica does not know how much she can trust Seb so although they have one goal, the dynamic is uneasy at least to begin with..
“Yeah, she’s been hurt so she struggles to trust anybody.
“He doesn’t trust her because he’s a detective and she’s evaporated a murderer so as far as he’s concerned, she’s complicit in a crime so you can understand the tension that’s there.
“I think the thing of who you trust and who you don’t trust in crime novels is a very interesting dynamic.”
The book unfolds in a short space of time giving it almost a real time quality. Do you like stories like that where there is little let up from the tension?
“I do and I like to write them like that.
“I like to write something that people are reading as fast as I’m writing it because when I’m reading a book and I’m really into it, I’m turning the pages ‘til there’s smoke coming off my fingers.
“The best compliment anyone could pay me is that they feel the same.
“I have a lot of people saying, ‘I had to stay up all night reading the book’.
“They’re the books that I want to read myself.”
It feels very cinematic to me which is unsurprising as it is set to be adapted for the screen. Also a screenwriter you consider the two disciplines very different…
“When I’m writing (a novel), I go into my hobbit hole as I call it.
“I just disappear in the cave and I have to concentrate on what I’m doing.
“Script is a collaboration from start to finish.
“You do a one pager of a show, a pitch and then you write a pilot episode and even at that point, they’re already talking to you about where it might go.
“You’re already having conversations about what the show is going to be.
“And there’s a lot of money in it.
“The budget of shows can be one and a half million per episode so when there’s that kind of money, there’s a lot of big voices involved.
“This book Never To Be Found was subject of a massive bidding war but I’ve given it to Amazon MGM and Angela Kang, the showrunner of The Walking Dead, and I’m just going to let her write it because I have enough projects on but also I’m just thinking, ‘This woman’s a genius and she’ll do it more justice than anybody can’.
“I’m happy to have the distance from it.
“But she said when she met me, exactly as you’ve said there, ‘It’s very visual, you can see it and you can see those worlds’.”
You have also already adapted your previous book The Last to Disappear so that must be exciting..
“Yeah, we just finished filming that a couple of weeks ago and I watched the pilot episode, a very rough cut, during the week.
“It’s very exciting.
“That one I did adapt with my co-writer on Harry Wild, (David Logan) and it was fun.
“If you get a book adapted for screen, you’re in the 0.1% of authors and for it to be a bidding war on this one, I was pinching myself.
“I was convinced it was just a dream.”
Although Japan comes into it, the story is set mostly in Brighton and York. What made you want to set it in those English locations?
“Well, there was two reasons.
“One, I knew I was never going to set it in Ireland because the notion that you could evaporate somebody in Ireland, it’s undoable.
“There was a story I’d heard a year or so ago and it was a man saying, ‘You could never have an affair in Ireland because I’ve just come back from a hike in Killarney that I told nobody I was going on and bumped into my father-in-law’.
“So Ireland’s too small to set this story realistically.
“My partner is from Brighton and so we go over quite a lot.
“It looks stunning and it’s full of interesting people so that was a no-brainer for me.
“York, just because I’m fascinated with York. I just love it.
“I love the entire north of England to be honest.
“I wasn’t familiar with Japan so I had to make sure I bloody well knew about the other places I was writing.”
The book is not the only exciting thing you have going on at the moment as the fifth series of Harry Wild has just landed. You have written and produced the mystery series starring Jane Seymour from the beginning. I bet you didn’t foresee it would go five series when you started..
“In this day and age, it’s almost unheard of to have a recurring series.
“But it’s a proper family on the Harry Wild set.
“It started with Jane and myself and David.
“Every year we get together and we make a point of being friends which encourages people to come back because we’re not a massive budget show so you’re asking people to work on something, work very hard, camp themselves in Ireland for months on end.
“And it’s done wonders for the Irish film industry.
“We’re hiring half of Ireland every year because it’s weekly murders as well so the actors have to be renewed every week to join the key cast.
“We’re getting to the point now where we’re like, ‘If you haven’t been in Harry Wild, what have you done? Who have you upset?’
“But it’s becoming like a cult classic.
“I think it could go on and on if Jane’s willing to keep abandoning her Malibu mansion and the heat for cold Irish winters because we certainly love writing it.
“It’s crime but it’s also comedy and that’s always nice to write.”
I think people love the series because of Jane’s character who may be older but is still full of life and that’s something we don’t see a lot of..
“Yeah, we always say she likes her men, her whiskey and cursing in whatever order she gets them.
“She was the perfect actress for that role because Harry Wild is so sassy and Jane is an absolute professional A-lister but she’s also sassy and funny and smart so it’s art imitating life.
“Sometimes she says stuff and I just go, ‘That’s going into the script, that’s just perfect’.
“She’s a joy to work with so long may it last.
“Rohan came in and he was brilliant from day one but he says himself working with Jane and she’s been in the business for so long, she gave him a lot of tips and advice just from the pure years of experience.
“I remember when she found out that I liked champagne and the first time I went over to her house she said, ‘Open the fridge there’ and she’s got something like eight bottles of champagne.
“I was like, ‘I like champagne but I’m not an alcoholic. But thank you’.”
I bet it is similar with the books. This is your 14th novel, I bet you don’t think about that when you start..
“I love telling the stories.
“And readers love it and I’m getting more and more readers all the time and they contact me and say things like, ‘When’s your next Tom Reynolds? We’re going to kidnap you and make you write it’. So that’s not creepy at all.”
Did you always know you wanted to write?
“There was a definitely a point when I took a chance of writing the very first book to see what would happen.
“I can’t lie.
“I think from an early age, I knew I was going to be an author even though I didn’t get to it until I was in my mid 30s.
“I knew I was a good writer.
“I had teachers telling me all the time.
“I worked in jobs that were journalism and writing speeches and things like that, so I knew I could write.
“I guess I told myself, ‘But people like me don’t get to be authors..’
“I’m from very working-class background and something switched in my head at some point.
“I always remember a friend saying to me, ‘Why not you? You know everybody on the shelf is just a person…’
“I think when you ask a lot of people who become successful in their chosen field, they will tell you that it was something they wanted to do from an early age.
“It didn’t fall into our laps.
“There’s something in our heads that says, ‘This is for me’.”
There is a wealth of Irish crime writers and particularly female ones around now with yourself, Andrea Mara, Jane Casey, Catherine Howard, Liz Nugent and more. Can you put your finger on any reason Ireland has so many great female Irish crime writers, is there something in the Irish female psychology perhaps?
“I think it’s a combination of things.
“I imagine in years to come, there will be studies done on this.
“I do think when you open up the door to an opportunity, other people look at it.
“When Katie Taylor wins gold, girls start joining boxing clubs.
“I’ve heard other people with far better articulacy than me talk about how repressed women were in the country and there’s probably a kind of a darkness in our souls almost.
“We can go to dark places.
“I’d say there’s a multitude of reasons but I definitely think once the glass ceiling is shattered, people just start going, ‘I can do that too’.”
Never To Be Found by Jo Spain is out now (Zaffre, £16.99).
