words

Patty Christiena Willis began making her own storybooks as soon as she could write. Highly influenced by her father's nightly fairy tales, her first stories were filled with fairies and kings who had their heads chopped off.

Her life has been spent mostly in foreign lands with the past twenty-one years in Japan. The folk and fairy tale culture that surrounds her mountain home forms the matrix of her illustrated novels and plays. The best time of day is the evening when mist rises up from the valley and stars appear one after another.

When you look at the pictures, she hopes that you can hear the rise and fall of cicadas echoing from one side of the valley to the other or see the flashing night eyes of badgers out on the prowl.

Patty Christiena Willis' new novel:
The Village above the Stars, translated into Japanese by Fumiko Koshimoto, is available through Amazon Books and bookstores throughout Japan.

The badgers were especially strict in observing the Festival of the Dead. And, to award their posterity, the badger ancestors felt no need to stay invisible and arrived for all to see on a brilliant chariot in the clouds.

The family of three sat in silence but sensitive ears could have heard the tearing of cloth. The tearing of the delicate fabric of village life. Gossamer threads tentatively thrown over divides too deep and wide to cross had formed a sailcloth as fragile as a cat's cradle and that sail with all its minute repairs had carried Lucky Field over centuries of stormy sea.