There is something extraordinary about having a conversation with John Francis Cross.

I’ve had the pleasure in a variety of locations over the years:

• A seedy, incense-and-cigarette-smoke-infused basement bar in Ikenoue

• A rooftop café in Sangenjaya

• Along the banks of several inner-city rivers

• A vast, Parisian-style underground coffee shop in Shinjuku, with elegant china and waiters you’d swear are thousand-year-old vampires, poker-faced above their bow ties

It has something to do with his accent, which is exotic to someone like me (though probably less so to anyone from the UK), and the way he drawls out a casual response like “Riiiiiiiiiiight” before catching you off-guard with a follow-up Pandora’s box of stories, anecdotes, and quietly brazen imagery: all containing hints to the magical worlds that lie within his psyche.

It’s this flavor of intimate treasure-sharing, of passing one wondrous tale from mouth to ear, that give John’s books (five and counting so far) their unusual sense of presence.

His latest, 100 100-Word True Travel Stories,  is the sort of rare book that has an almost human quality to it. You could be reading it alone in your kitchen while it rains outside, or on a crowded train on your way to yet another anxiety-inducing dental appointment, or curled up in a corner booth at Blue Monday in Shimokitazawa, and feel as though he is right there beside you, cackling excitedly about bus stations in Tangier and taxi cabs in Tel Aviv. It’s that warm. It’s that alive.

We met up at a quiet, almost sepia-toned café near the Tama River in early December to chat about this. After ordering our coffees, soon to arrive in spectacular pink and black mugs, I casually asked him that stupid question seasoned travelers always get asked: How many countries have you been to? John says he has no idea, and shrugs as if it’s of no importance. It’s a refreshing response, and it makes me think maybe he’s so accustomed to jetting from one locale to the next that it’s become old hat, and something even more exotic lies in his future—maybe he’ll be hopping around planets at some point, rather than countries! But soon we get down to the business at hand.

ME: So tell me about the origin of the book. What planted the seed?

JFC: The real start was that someone in Brighton, where I lived, had a magazine and said “Can you write 700 words,” and I thought, “What a weird thing.” And then, if it’s numbers, I could just do seven stories, seven of one hundred words. Recently I came back to that and thought I’d like to do a full 100.

The first of the 100 stories opens early in John’s life, on the very day of his birth (I was born one Thursday morning in Morecambe, a seaside resort on a dangerous bay with sinking sands and lightning tides), and the next couple present a childhood in rural England yearning for the world beyond. We get there through a portal called Tel Aviv, on John’s first night in a foreign city, and what follows are several decades of electrifying characters and close encounters with the police and the display of incredible jackets (two at the same time!) and envy-inducing local dishes in countries as diverse as Holland, France, India, China, and Japan.

ME: And why true? Why did you try to make them all true?

JFC: I’m interested in the idea of discipline. Making it 100 words is a kind of discipline, and then making it all true is another kind of discipline. I think that relates to my long-term thought that my opinions aren’t interesting. So then, if you kind of force yourself to write something that you wouldn’t normally write, then your real belief or attitudes will come out more. So by having discipline—a phrase you might use, or a certain number of words, or that it must be true—then something deeper will come out than just your opinions.

ME: So, the formality of the structure kind of gives you more of an opportunity to really grow.

JFC: Yeah. You’ve gotta write something, and you’re sort of forced to reveal more than you might want to.

This sense of discipline has long informed John’s writing and works, particularly his 2018 collection of poems, Drunk God Sees Poet, based upon the writing prompts offered up for inspiration at the monthly Drunk Poets See God open mic event at Bar Gari Gari. As with that work, 100 Stories delves deep into the personal and reveals all sorts of things. There are touching moments, some of them brief, with women encountered on the road (Her name was a beautiful sound that I’ve never forgotten), as well as quietly alert encounters with men (Hitchhiking out of Holland, three men picked me up near the German border and took me to stay in a Dusseldorf suburb. They were very kind but I showered with a knife by the soap).

Perhaps it was inevitable that John would write this book, as travel has been a central theme in his earliest work, starting when he began writing around the age of six.

JFC: Or maybe before that, but I only have evidence (notebook) from age six. I wrote about a trip to an airport to see off my auntie, we waved from a viewing platform. About dreams of being underwater. And of a helicopter taking me for a flight (dream). And places I wanted to travel and work (Sydney docks).

And there is a prophecy too, in the third of the 100 stories, uttered by a school friend named Mike on the isolated shores of Skye: “I see you living here and being a writer.”

What actually came to pass is this: John lived practically everywhere else and became a writer. He spent several years studying in China and eventually working as a journalist there, and has been living in Tokyo since the mid-1990s. In 2018 he spent time in northwest India to take part in a writer’s residency, hosting workshops for adults and children (and attending an event featuring “serious writers and an excellent hula hoop dancer”).

The appearances of India peppered throughout 100 Stories, detailing this and other visits, are something truly vibrant and special: everybody smiling, laughing, shouting, moving, and mad happy to see anybody they recognized in one; Afterwards we were torch-led back to the bike and saw fireflies shining in trees and riverbank bushes, and being reflected in water like floating stars in another.

I’m amazed at the level of recall in the stories, all of which feel as though they are occurring in the present moment. There is no sense of a man reminiscing about glory days or past adventures. Each story sounds like now. How did he do that?

JFC: Well the stories had to be something that I recalled, that I could remember. Just pure memory. So there’s that. I also got details from journals. We recently moved house, and some old journals came to light. …But towards the end, I got to thinking, it’s not just individual stories, it’s a whole thing. It’s a work. It’s not just a hundred separate things. There should be a kind of overall mood about it as well.

ME: What mood were you going for?

JFC: Well, I wanted it to be positive, and focus on the people. I’m not gonna describe cathedrals or something, but the interactions, and the different moods. And also, not just the big things that happened. Some big things happened, but even very small things, small interactions with people, stayed in my mind, and they’re also part of that whole thing of traveling, so I wanted to keep those as well. Just small things.

ME: I think you really summed that up nicely in the final story, when you’re talking to the Greek woman in the Ethiopian café, and at the end she just says simply “I enjoy meeting you and talking,” and you say, “Me too.”

JFC: It’s EXACTLY that.

The people are indeed the true highlight of this book. It’s an astonishing array of individuals, all captured so exquisitely—and so fully—in such a short number of words. With every turn of the page we meet a glittering assortment of new personalities: grape-pickers in a semi-derelict farmhouse coming to blows over glasses of wine; the daughter of James Joyce’s illegitimate son; women in Andhra Pradesh wearing saris of kaleidoscopic colors, scented flowers behind their ears and in their hair; an Israeli pianist; a London Jewish boy playing volleyball with a lit cigarette in his hand.

ME: You mention so many people in these stories, so many friends, the occasional lover…. Have you sent copies of the book to any of them? And if so, how have they responded?

JFC: I haven’t. I’m thinking about that. I did send the book to eight people to start with. But there’s so many I could send it to.

ME: Right! There’s at least a hundred. What would your hope be, if they read it? What would you wanna leave them with?

JFC: Well I hope they’d feel I’d done them justice. And I didn’t make them feel bad about anything. Or slightly embarrassed.

ME: It’s almost like you encountered all these beautiful characters tucked away somewhere and you’re like what’s THIS?! And then you wrote a story. And I mean your style is different, but the tone reminds me so much of Jack Kerouac. The way every time he met somebody, he’d just get stars in his eyes. And he’s like, I wanna know all about this person.

JFC: Yes. Some of his best writing is really just in the moment. I mean, him describing eating breakfast for example, that really struck me. Eating his eggs and bacon.

This leads to the second highlight of the book, which for me, undoubtedly, is the food. There’s a description of an incredible picnic in France (“baguettes, knives, homemade salami, cheese, and bottles of chateau wine”), boiled mince as an alternative to chili con carne in Coventry; lime juice on Rawa Island; flying fish and ashitaba leaves on Hachijojima; and, thrillingly, “a green chili marinated in yogurt for a week and then plunged into boiling oil”.

But when I press John for details about what prompted him to celebrate food in this way, he insists it was not intentional. Really, it’s about the souls.

JFC: Just thinking of all these people I’ve met, I feel it’s just amazing, isn’t it. I mean, I’m sure everyone experiences the same, it’s not only me, but isn’t it fantastic? It’s a way of looking at our lives, in a kind of different way. How rich we are.

ME: That feeling is really present throughout the book. Positivity, play. It’s a refreshing viewpoint, it’s such a positive feeling.

JFC: Well, I wanted to write something that I would also like to read, at this moment. Something that doesn’t bring me down.

John’s previous four books can be classified as novels or poetics (two of each), whereas this one rather defies genre, dancing back and forth on a line in the sand drawn between short fiction and memoir.

JFC: It is a memoir, yes, but really I’m trying to create an artifact.

ME: An artifact! Go on…

JFC: So, each story is an artifact. It is true… But what’s true? I’m creating an object—a hundred individual objects—and a whole book. So, everything’s true, but there are many things missing.

ME: In addition to short stories and memoir, this can be considered a kind of travelogue. And nobody’s really traveled for the last year and a half, including yourself. Was the writing of this book a kind of substitute for travel?

JFC: Not deliberately, but maybe it ended up like that. And like my friend Paulo that I sent the book to said, “Maybe we’ll never travel like that again. It’s never going to be the same, is it.” And I think maybe that’s right. For various reasons, even before Covid. But, you know, when I was young, if you wanted to travel, it was so easy. You’d just go there.

ME: Europe for 5 dollars a day!

JFC: Right! And you could just hitchhike, and people invited you to stay in their houses… And you know, bad things could happen, and they did, but mainly it was okay, and you could just sort of… People with British passports could just go anywhere. And you could find work, and there was less worry about the future, and less worry about the present. I think there were dangers as well, but… So in a way, I think these stories are a celebration of how things were.

These 100 stories span John’s whole life, from the day of his birth to his most recent (international) travel experience a year and a half ago. I wonder, how does he feel he has evolved as a writer, and as a traveler, from the first story to the last?

JFC: Maybe as a writer, I’m more objective. And more thinking about the overall sensation that the reader might feel. Rather than just the content and the style. …More concerned with the overall impact of that artifact. I feel a certain confidence in writing. It’s not perfect, but I can do a few things that I want to do with writing. So I’ve got some skill, but then what am I gonna do with that.

ME: Right. I mean, many people can write. But not everyone can form a world.

JFC: As for traveling… Maybe it’s the little instances, and the people you meet, that are the main purpose really. I recently took a trip to Izu, and just chatting with the owner of the minshuku was the highlight.

ME: And that’s irreplaceable. Because no one will have the same experience. …I think that’s why this book feels so alive to me. More so that other travel books I’ve read. It’s your respect of that unrepeatable moment. It just comes through, every single story.

One thing I’ve long envied about John is his almost supernatural ability to come up with book after book, seemingly out of thin air: they just appear one day, whole new worlds you can hold in your hand. I’d give anything to be as prolific as that. Five times in as many years!

ME: What compels you to get it out there, so often? How do you do that?

JFC: I suppose I’ve always been writing something. At least since the age of six. Maybe before. I’d probably be writing if I was on a desert island, alone. Not probably: I would be. So there’s that. But then, until recently, I didn’t create anything. I was writing, but nobody knew about it. So I was thinking, I have to get that out. And I wanted to write something that nobody else would write, but I could write.

ME: I love the idea of just putting it out there. I mean, everybody procrastinates, but I think writers have a little bit more of that tendency—I certainly do—and just to have somebody say “Fuck it, here’s my book, and here’s the next one, and the next one”—and they’re all incredible, it really blows my mind that you do that.

JFC: Thank you very much. Though I’m not sure everyone would think that! But really, you just do what you can do. And recently, I’ve had some health issues, which made me consider, Do I want to be alive, or not? And I thought yes. So why? Well one reason is to write. So I should do that then. And make things.

Shifting tone slightly:

ME: This next question is important, so please take it seriously! Who is one writer, dead or alive, that you’d wanna bang?

JFC: Riiiiiight… Nobody comes to mind, honestly speaking…

This leads to a lengthy conversation about the pros and cons of various literary luminaries and the saddening reality that a writer whom one respects might differ from one to whom you’d feel a carnal attraction. Several names are presented as candidates (“Balzac? A maybe not very attractive person, but interesting, that’s for sure”) and then scrutinized (“But then could I withdraw that after we met? Would I be obliged to go through with it?”). Ultimately, all are discarded.

After book five, what’s up next for John Francis Cross?

He tells me he intends to spend the next year focused on his drawings and paintings (“They seem to make people feel positive”), and tantalizingly, there is another novel in the works.

ME: Can you give us a teaser?

JFC: It’ll be easy to read and full of light.

Our coffees long finished, we leave the café and head out into the cold, brittle sunlight of Tokyo in December. Our aim is the Tama River, a serenely flowing waterway whose banks we have traversed before. Sometimes I guess both of us must be ghosts, the way we haunt moving bodies of water at a certain time of day. We speak contemplatively of oat milk lattes, of Elvis Presley, of books written by people other than us. There is a lonesome tinge to the air and in the distance, partially obscured by trees and indistinct overgrowth, a solitary man plays his trumpet. Later we come across another lone man practicing his golf swing. I’m too shy to talk to him, but John effortlessly strikes up a conversation and the two of them chat for a moment. The happy energy bounces between them like a whole new form of sunlight.

(Purchase 100 100-Word True Travel Stories here)