The author of "The Samurai's Garden," the current book club selection, was peppered with what one reader called "really burning questions." Members of the crowd of about 70 at Hawai'i Public Radio's Atherton Center for the Performing Arts asked how much of the book is fact and how much fiction (pretty much all of it), whether she'd like to see a movie made of one of her books (maybe), if any of her characters are based on her life (only in the broadest sense), what she's currently working on (she doesn't talk about work in progress).

And they laid out their theories about the characters in the book and murmured assent and buzzed with interest as Tsukiyama explained her own thoughts as she was constructing this, her second of five novels.

Tsukiyama, whose rascally sense of humor fits right in with Hawai'i style, possibly because her father was from the Islands, revealed that when she was writing "The Samurai's Garden," she never thought she'd get it published, and that the title was merely a few words to fill in a blank on a book contract, although it turned out to be the right one in the end.

In a private interview before the event, and later in talk before the audience, she gently pooh-poohed literary pretension and seemed amused but disengaged when the discussion turned to images, symbolism and metaphor. All those layers of meaning and reference are there, she acknowledged, but they are deeply personal to her and to the reader.

After years of listening to others dissect her works, she says, she's concluded that whatever the reader finds there is there, whether she meant it to be or not. That is, those elements are there for the individual who sees it, based on what that person brings to the book, or because she unconsciously put it there.

Many of the readers who visited carried copies of Tsukiyama's other novels, as well as "The Samurai's Garden." Particularly well loved are the companion books "Women of the Silk" (1991) and "The Language of Threads" (1999). Tsukiyama talked about how she came to write about the silk societies of China, in which women lived in dormitory style, devoting themselves to the making of silk thread and achieving a measure of independence and companionship not readily available to women with more conventional lives.

Although she is half-Japanese, Tsukiyama grew up in the midst of her mother's Chinese family, and, when she decided to try to write a novel, she began to explore

Chinese themes, eventually stumbling upon the long and detailed biography of the Chinese writer Han Suyin (best known for the film based on one of her novels, "Love is A Many Splendored Thing"). There, Tsukiyama found just a very brief reference to the silk societies, but it was sufficient to fire her interest and she began to research the subject, about which very little had been written.

Ironically and unknown to her, another woman was writing a non-fiction book on the topic, which came out at almost the same time as her novel. She laughed when she saw it: "If I'd had this, it would have been so easy!"

For her second book, Tsukiyama wanted a reason to look into her Japanese heritage, about which she knew much less. She found it in a story she'd been told in childhood, about a Chinese uncle who fell ill and went to live in a family beach cottage in Tarumi, Japan, for a year. She wondered what had happened: who had he met, what had he done, how had he been changed by the experience.

The book is a tribute to this uncle who she never met, she said, and the village of Tarumi does actually exist, but she never visited there although she did go to Japan during the course of her research. "I had a very clear vision of what Tarumi would be for the book, and I didn't want to have that changed," she said.

She says all she knew when she started was that "he was going to get off the train in Tarumi at the beginning, and he was going to get on the train a year later."

In addition to that wisp of a story about the uncle, she wanted to write a love story — but not an ordinary one. As she began to write, the structure emerged: The young boy, Stephen, would be the diarist who reports the action. But the love story would be between two characters who increasingly captured her attention, the family house servant, Matsu, and the woman he has loved all his life, Sachi, who has leprosy. As is typical of the writing process, this wasn't what she thought would happen, but what the characters dictated as they grew in her imagination.

Tsukiyama isn't bothered by readers who see meaning where she intended none. She understands that for her, the process of living with the characters for a year or two, and making the work, leaves her with a feeling of having said what she needed to say. But for readers, she said, "there's a feeling of wanting to go on, needing to know more."