Why I Built a Country That Doesn't Exist

At least three beta readers asked some version of the same question after reading Everything After: Is Jiyokon real?

And then, when they heard the answer: Why did you invent it?

It's a good question. One I want to answer honestly.

Jiyokon is a fictional country. I invented it with intention. And the intention was not to simplify — it was to expand.

The world Kanakami comes from is rooted in real cultural soil: East Asian in its aesthetics, its family structures, its social expectations, the particular weight that duty and lineage carry in how a person moves through their life. Those things are real. They exist across multiple actual places, in variations, with their own histories and distinctions that I respect and that no single invented country can fully claim.

Jiyokon is not Japan, or Korea, or China. It is shaped by all of them, the way a river carries sediment from every geography it passes through.

What that choice gave me was freedom from a specific kind of reader anxiety I've watched derail otherwise fully engaged readers: the accuracy spiral. The moment a reader who knows a place deeply starts auditing the text — that's not how it would work in Tokyo, the social structure you're describing is more Korean, this detail doesn't track — they're no longer in the story. They're fact-checking. And they're not wrong to do it. Real places carry real weight, and writers who use them carry real responsibility.

I chose a different responsibility. A fictional country meant I could draw with care from multiple traditions without making a claim to any one of them. Jiyokon's food, its architecture, the way its people think about honor and family and what a person owes their country — all of it is informed by real-world research, real cultures, real history. But it belongs to Jiyokon.

Here is what the choice did not do: make things easier.

Leiliana is a Black American woman. That is not background detail — it is a fact of who she is that operates in every room she walks into, including the rooms of Jiyokon. The story does not set that aside because the country is fictional. If anything, an invented setting gave me more precision, not less. I could write the specific dynamics that arise when she is navigating a place with its own distinct relationship to outsiders, to race, to what belonging requires — without being constrained to one country's documented history. The pressure is drawn from real things real people experience. The fictional frame let me focus it.

Kanakami carries what his country expects of him. Jiyokon has a particular idea of what its people owe it, what a man of his position should want, how his choices reflect on his family and on the nation itself. That weight is real. Those expectations are real. I didn't invent Jiyokon to escape them. I invented it so they could live exactly where the story needed them to.

I'll say this too, because I think it's worth saying: this was a choice for this story. Not a principle I hold above all others.

I'm working on something now that could not exist inside a fictional country. The story lives in London and Lagos, and the culture and history of those places — specific, real, irreplaceable — is the architecture the whole narrative is built from. Remove the specificity and you lose the story. The real place is the point.

Jiyokon was a different kind of point. A world that needed to exist in a particular way, for characters who needed room to become exactly who they are.

When readers asked me if it was real — if they could visit, if it was somewhere they'd missed — I took that as the best possible answer to the question of why I built it.

You believed in it. You wanted to go there.

That was always the goal.