Colin O’Sullivan: The Kerry man whose novel was turned into a major streaming series
Colin O'Sullivan is the author of Sunny, adapted by Apple TV for the Sunny series.
It is mid-morning in Cork when Colin O’Sullivan pops up on my screen and he has already put in a full day’s work on the other side of the world. The Japan-based Kerryman takes it all in his stride — as well as working full-time as an English teacher, he has also published six books. He initially moved to Japan in 1999 to teach English for one year but love intervened when he met his wife Yuki; they went on to have two children and now live in Aomori in the country’s northern prefecture.
O’Sullivan’s debut, Killarney Blues, based in his hometown, was published in 2013, and won the prestigious French award, the Prix Mystère de la Critique. However, it is his third novel, The Dark Manual, from 2018, which has recently put him in the spotlight, attracting global attention as the inspiration for the Apple TV series Sunny, about a woman who reluctantly ends up with a robot companion after her Japanese husband and son die in a plane crash.
Sunny the show has been tweaked somewhat for TV audiences, including switching the Irish protagonist of O’Sullivan’s book, Susie Sakamoto, to the American Suzie, played by Rashida Jones. While he was invited on set and attended the launch, O’Sullivan has had no involvement with the show, but The Dark Manual has now been republished with the title Sunny and O’Sullivan is enjoying the attention it has brought to his work.
“I’ve been writing for a long time and I’ve been under the radar for so long. But since the TV series, my name is getting out there and it’s nice. People are emailing me saying they are going back and checking out my back catalogue.” O’Sullivan says he has always felt compelled to express himself as a writer.
“My mother talks about me picking up the newspaper from a very early age, like three, and being able to read paragraphs. I would have an idea and write it down, whether it was a little rhyming couplet, or a song to myself, or some genesis of a story. The compulsion was there to get it out, and if I didn't get it out, I'd get quite narky. I still feel that way. If I go a week or two without getting these ideas out, I can be quite irascible.”
Killarney was also fertile ground for his creativity to grow and he was part of a writing group from a young age. “Everyone’s a storyteller in Kerry. When I go back home and I’m with friends and your family, I realise there aren’t conversations going on, rather there are stories. Somebody kind of takes over and begins a tale of something that has happened, which I miss. In Japan, conversations are more give and take.”
While many writers can only dream of having their work adapted by a global streaming platform, the initial inspiration for The Dark Manual was literally the stuff of nightmares, says O’Sullivan.
“I remember going down to breakfast to my wife and the remnants of a dream were still there, and this sense of dread. She asked me was I okay and I said, ‘Oh, I had this terrible dream last night about this robot that I had programmed myself and it was trying to kill me, but I couldn’t shut it off.’ She said it sounded like it would make a great science fiction movie — and that was the genesis of it. Science fiction was never my genre at all but I started to sketch out a few ideas and I pitched it around to a few more people.” Interestingly, O’Sullivan writes all his novels as screenplays initially.
“I always write a screenplay before every novel, I don't know why. It creates a structure for me. If I have all the dialogue and characters in place, and I have the plot from A to Z, it makes it a lot easier. I think one of the reasons I do it is time constraints. I only get time to write on weekends. I work from Monday to Friday as a teacher, in Japan we don’t get a lot of holidays at all. Even now it's the middle of the summer, we’re still going to school. I don't want to waste time. On a Saturday morning, I’m straight into it because I’ve done the thinking during the week. The screenplay structure is the kind of scaffolding that I know where I’m going. I’ve got a roadmap.”
In The Dark Manual, the character of Susie, already alone in a foreign country, is left further isolated after the deaths of her son and husband. There are obvious resonances with O’Sullivan’s own experiences when he arrived in Japan.
“It was a huge culture shock and 20 years later it still is. There are some things you just don’t get used to. You become very adept at chopsticks after a few days, all of that kind of thing is fine. But just the way systems are, like the education system, or politics, the way people think is just so alien to the way we would think of doing things. And sometimes I just can’t get my head around it.”
However, O’Sullivan also has a deep affection for his adopted home. “There is this kind of ‘grass is greener’ syndrome that a lot of us expats have. I might be here complaining that we do this or that better in Ireland, but then when I'm at home in Ireland, I'm thinking, ‘God, I'd love to be back in Japan’. So there's this kind of to-ing and fro-ing within me.”
The sense of being an outsider is also something that helps him as a writer. “You can never fit in completely, but that might suit the artist. I'm thinking of Joyce and Beckett, of course, who is a huge hero of mine — to be the fish out of water, and to be from outside looking in, you get a different perspective”
As all of O’Sullivan’s books also exist as screenplays, it’s safe to assume he wouldn’t be averse to more of his work being transferred to the screen. I mention the fact that his fellow Killarney man, Michael Fassbender, has already optioned work by the Irish novelists Colin Barrett (Calm With Horses) and Kevin Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) for film. He laughs heartily, as it turns out he had a starring role in one of Fassbender’s early productions.
“We acted together back in the day in Killarney in an amateur drama group. I remember one summer, it must have been the early ’90s, I was working in my dad's dry cleaners for the summer. Michael came in, he was doing a version of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and someone had pulled out, so he asked me would I play Mr Orange — and him being so charming, of course, he twisted my arm. So we acted together in this theatre version of Reservoir Dogs in a nightclub. I haven't seen him in years. But yes, all of the books exist in screenplay form and are available for option — so he would be more than welcome.”
- Sunny, published by Mariner Books, is out now. The series is currently streaming on Apple TV+
