The most acclaimed television series of the year, FX’s historical samurai saga Shōgun took home eighteen Emmy Awards last month, the biggest haul ever for a show in a single year. Based on the 1975 best-selling novel by James Clavell, which was turned into a hit 1980 miniseries, this version was lauded for its authenticity—it’s mostly in Japanese, with subtitles, and uses a mostly Japanese cast—as well as its refreshing focus on strong female characters. This painstaking attention to detail is a testament to its creators, the married team of Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks. They spent more than five years on the show—their first time working together—during a tumultuous time that spanned a pandemic, the birth of their two children, and a move to Maui.
The couple are returning to Austin, where they lived for four years, this week for the thirty-first annual Austin Film Festival & Writers Conference. Marks, who grew up in Houston, is an Oscar-nominated writer for Top Gun: Maverick and this week signed a deal with FX Productions to develop new shows, along with two more seasons of Shōgun. He’ll receive the Writer’s Writer Award, while Kondo, who was born in Hawaii and got her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, is being honored with the festival’s New Voice Award. They’ll be on AFF panels this weekend and will present Throne of Blood, the 1957 Akira Kurosawa classic, at 3 p.m. on Sunday at the Paramount Theatre. The screening is open to festival attendees as well as the general public; tickets are $20.
Kondo, who was a finalist for the 2014 Keene Prize for Literature while at UT, spoke to Texas Monthly before her return to one of her favorite cities to talk about her time in the Lone Star State, what it’s like to work with her husband, gaining confidence as a writer, and the second season of Shōgun.
Texas Monthly: Why did you leave L.A. for Austin a decade ago?
Rachel Kondo: I was at a specific place in my life; I was in my early thirties and somewhat newly married, and I thought that was it. Not to sound so dour about marriage, but I was like, “I’ve done what I can do. Now I must be married, I guess.” (Laughs.) And I was kind of lost. I was in my fourth or fifth year taking adult extension courses at UCLA, and it was during that time that MFAs were all the rage. I thought, “Well, can one do that? Does my marital status matter, and does one do this at the late stage of their early thirties?” So I threw my hat in the ring, and shock, miracle of miracles, Michener let me in. Going to Austin was nothing short of this wondrous thing for me. We drove there from L.A. with a U-Haul and our two pups, and as we got closer and closer to Texas, the landscape started opening up more and more, and I thought, “What is this endless space?” It was so, so cool for a little Maui girl.
TM: What was your time at Michener like?
RK: Unfortunately, I spent a lot of my time at Michener fighting the feelings of unworthiness like, “What am I doing here? What do I have to say that anybody would want to listen to?” And on and on and on, basically just the writer’s plight. And I should have known that if you are grappling with these ideas, it’s probably because you’re a writer. My eyes were constantly wide and hungry to learn. It’s such a crazy thing that there could be something like this, a place that people can come take time out from life to say, “What is it I actually think about this world and existence?” And then you go back to your regular life and realize how special that was and how uncommon it is.
TM: You went to Michener for fiction, not screenwriting. Did you see yourself working in the TV industry a decade ago or working solely as a short-story writer and novelist?
RK: Two things: First, because I’m married to Justin and that’s what he does and did for all the years I’ve known him, I knew it was possible. My aspirations continue to be [becoming] a novelist. One day I’ll pull out that old dusty pile of notes I have. . . . There are many ideas where I only see them through the lens of prose writing, and then there are a couple of ideas that I don’t really even want to approach writing in prose simply because they’re more visual . . . more cinematic. And the second thing is I had been in the quote-unquote industry for many years before Michener. I was an assistant at CAA. I worked as a story editor for a production company. I tried, and I was not very good at it, so in my mind that was kind of done and over with, that part of my life.
TM: What does being recognized by the Austin Film Festival mean to you?
RK: I can remember my first time going to AFF—I guess it must have been in 2013. I held onto that badge like it was entry into some special land, and I was just so excited to be there. So all these years later, to be honored is kind of wild. Also, the funny thing is when they said it was the New Voice Award, my first thought was, “Do they mean like Middle-Aged Voice award? Old Voice Award?” Because it feels like that’s for a young person, but I’ll take it.
TM: You were a semifinalist in the script competition in 2014. What did you submit?
RK: It was for my beloved script about Eleanor Roosevelt as a young teen going to a boarding school and falling in love with her headmistress, and I’m just baffled that nobody wants to make that movie. (Laughs.)
TM: That sounds amazing. Was that your first screenplay?
RK: Totally. That’s my only screenplay.
TM: What drew you to Shōgun?
RK: Justin had just signed his overall deal with FX. They sent him the book around December of 2018, and it just sat there, this big tome. We were doing dishes, and he said, “You know that book, right? You’ve read it?” And I was like, “No, I haven’t read it, but I know it. How do I know it?” And he was like, “Yeah, I haven’t read it either, but how do I know it?” And we both got curious. Before even reading the book, I said, “Look, I agree with you. You shouldn’t do this project. You should do this project with me. We should do this project.” I don’t know where that goal came from. It was probably simply because I thought, “Well, I’m Japanese, and you’re not.” But very quickly did I learn that being Japanese American born in Hawaii is a completely different thing than being a Japanese national and a native speaker. And to Justin’s credit, he didn’t balk, and we read the book. We thought we knew what it was about, but we had no idea the kinds of questions it would ask and themes it would weave in, and we were astonished at how relatable it was and how timely it felt in the era we were reading it.
TM: A lot has been written about all the care and detail that went into making the series as authentic as possible, especially the Japanese translations. What did you learn from that process?
RK: That if you go that extra step, you’re going to find all these special moments and these jewels—if you have that time, and I realize that’s a luxury that we were afforded through FX. And it took months of our editing team listening to marital spats over punctuation and word choice.
TM: What was it like working with your husband?
RK: Looking back, I think, “Thank God we didn’t know what we were getting into because it’s hard.” We have very, very, very different processes. He is very measured, and he is very good at getting the work done. He’s such a student of architecture, both literal architecture and story architecture, and so I had to really learn to not bring my more chaotic process to it. In hindsight, what we realized was that it wasn’t my Japanese upbringing that was my contribution. My contribution oddly was that as a kid, I read every historical romance novel in the library and I watched every BBC production available to man, and it was that kind of obsession with costume dramas and palace intrigue and sweeping romances that lent itself [to the project]. And the thing that we’ve come to learn now is that all those years of fighting and the lectures and the battles I would wage, actually it was within the tension that we found the right happy medium between us. So tension is good for creativity.
TM: After five years of working on the show, having two children, and moving during that time—not to mention the pandemic—how great was it to celebrate your success during the awards season?
RK: Oh, so nuts. I’m always trying to fight for a seat in the nosebleeds, and most times I can’t even get that, and it’s just so wild that we got to be there. It was nuts to be able to share that effort and that passion with people. The awards thing was truly the . . . I would say the cherry on top, but it’s like the spotlight on the cherry on top.
TM: Where are you with writing the second season?
RK: We’re more than halfway through, believe it or not. We started in July. It’s been a whole different kettle of fish because it’s one thing to adapt a 1,200-page novel. It’s a whole other thing to study the choices Clavell made in writing that novel with history as our big, vast guide.
TM: I know you’re excited to return to Austin for AFF. Do you have favorite haunts you hope to hit?
RK: For sure, Justine’s and Hopfields. And I just want to drive around. Having a place that still retains something of a small-town feel while offering everything a city can offer is truly just special. You don’t find that. It’s so special that we always think we got out too soon and should have hung around a little longer, but then maybe we wouldn’t have made Shōgun, so . . .
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
