Hyperfixed - Samurai Gone Girl

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Growing up, Alison was a voracious reader. But there was one book series in particular that she devoured. "Samurai Girl" by Carrie Asai. Recently, Alison wanted to learn more about the author whose books she loved nearly 20 years ago. But she couldn't find anything about Carrie Asai. No other writing credits. No bio. So it left Alison wondering, who was Carrie Asai?LINKS: Samurai Girl Bob Levy's Book Sara Shepard Get tickets for the Hyperfixed live show!If you like this episode and would like to hear more like it, as well as join our discord and get discounts on merch, you can support us by going to https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/join.  Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

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Hey, this is Alex. And very quickly before we start, this is just a reminder that Hyperfixed is a completely independent outlet, and it is you guys, our listeners, that keep the lights on over here. So I am asking you to consider signing up for our premium membership at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. You'll get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, discounts on merch, discounts on live stuff. We currently have 3,500 premium subscribers, and my goal is to get 1,000 more premium subscribers by the end of the year. All of the revenue that we get from premium memberships goes directly back into the show. And with 1,000 subscribers, I would be able to both give the hyperfix staff

raises as well as pay for their health care, and have a little money left over to work on more ambitious reporting projects. So yeah, if you can help us get to 4,500 subscribers by the end of the year, that would be huge. Again, you can sign up at hyperfixpod.com slash join. One more thing is that we are doing a live show in Brooklyn in September, and we would love to see you there. You can get tickets at tickets.tickshedpod.com. All right. Here's the show. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, Samurai Gone Girl. My name is Heaven Kogo, and I died on my wedding day. I know that sounds strange, but it's true. I don't mean I died I died with the funeral and the coffin and grieving relatives. I'm still alive and well, more or less. But something happened on my wedding day that changed everything that came afterward. I started to feel like my life had two distinct periods, before wedding and after wedding.

Sometimes I wish I was still trapped in before. I mean, that's what a great opening. That makes me want to read it right away. I think that is a really good opening for a novel. You're like, ooh, what happened? This is Allison. She's 35 years old. She lives in Chicago.

And this thing you just heard her reading, it's from a young adult novel that she loved as a kid. the first in a six-book series called Samurai Girl, which tells the story of Heaven Kogo, the sole survivor of a Japanese plane crash who gets adopted by a wealthy family that turns out to be Yakuza, which forces her to flee to Los Angeles to learn how to defend her family

from the ninjas who want them dead. It feels very Y-A. It does feel very Y-A. But it's the kind of genre that I really liked as a kid. I was an avid reader, and for words, whatever reason, I was just really wrapped up in fantasy. I was really wrapped up in women, like,

learning how to fight in martial arts and stuff like that. And as a kid who chafed at gender roles and expectations, I think these books kind of gave me an outlet for that. Now, the last time Allison read the series, she's probably 10 or 11, and she really hadn't thought about it since. But just recently, Samurai Girl popped back onto Allison's radar. And when she looked Then it with adult eyes, she discovered something strange about this series. The discovery happened almost incidentally. Allison was reading one of her old YA novels, and something about it reminded her of Samurai Girl. And I was just thinking, oh, yeah, you know, I remember being obsessed with this series as a kid.

I should check up on what that author wound up doing. Maybe they're writing, you know, adult novels now that I would really enjoy. I want to see what they've done. and what they're up to. So Allison hops on the computer, and she runs a little Google search for the author of the series. And I just couldn't find anything. Like you couldn't find any information at all.

And, I mean, that's not from a lack of crying, right? Like, I have searched this a few times, and each time I just, I feel like I was scraping nothing. Like, I can't find the author anywhere. And what's the name of this author? The author's name is Carrie Asi. I ran my own little search for Carrie Asai, and just like Allison, I found nothing. I saw that her books had been published by Simon & Schuster, which is obviously a very reputable publisher,

and there was an author profile on their website, but all it said was that she'd written the Samurai Girl books. I also found some conversations about her on an old blog, but mostly people seem to be talking about the fact that nobody knew anything about her. As far as I could tell, Carrie Asai hadn't written any other books. didn't have any social media presence, and it seemed like she'd never given an interview, which wouldn't have been super weird for a novelist whose one and only YA series was published more than 20 years ago, and perhaps only read by combat crazy tweens like Allison, except it turns out that Samurai Girl had also been adapted into a TV series for ABC Family. And I don't know much about marketing, but I think if I were a publisher or a TV executive for that matter, that would be a great

time to start sending this author out on interviews to hype up their series. So, what was going on here? Did Carrie Asai write one series and disappear? Or did she never really exist? Was she merely a pseudonym for some other author that nobody bothered to unmask because this series never rose to the level of popularity that would justify anyone doing the work? Or were we looking into something else entirely? Whatever the answer, Allison just wants to know. And as the podcast repository for people's innocuous niche questions,

she reached out to Hyperfix for answers. I just, I find it so odd that there's somebody who, you know, has written a series and you can't find them at all. I think that's super weird, too. So you'd mostly like to figure out more about this person who wrote the books. Yes, and I think maybe part of that

would be how they got published because possibly that's a clue along the way to who did it or vice versa. But the curiosity I have is just about the author. Okay, so we're going to look into this and we will follow up with you. And in the meantime, we really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. For sure. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to talk to me. I'm really curious about what you find. All right. So from the moment we start our search, we're operating under the assumption that Kariassai is not a real person. That the reason we can't find any information.

information about her is because she's simply a pseudonym used by some other writer. And the fact that this other writer has never stepped forward to say, hey, I'm Kariassai, suggests that they may not want people to know that they wrote the series. Now, obviously, this could make things complicated, because we're not the kind of operation that sets out to expose artists who don't want to be exposed. But we have faced this issue in the past, with an indie band that had been releasing music anonymously for the past 10 years and wasn't totally sold on the idea of, let's letting people know who they really were.

And I think it's safe to say that we handled that situation with the delicate touch it deserved, and the whole thing ended up feeling pretty positive for everyone involved. So we forged ahead with the same tactics we'd learned from that investigation. We asked ourselves, if there's a person behind this person, who would know that person's name? And the answer was the same. The only people who would know for sure are the people with whom she did business.

In this case, that's the people who helped publish her books. So we reached out to the head of children's publicity at Simon & Schuster, but we didn't hear back. So we reached out to the marketing manager at Simon and Schuster. But again, we didn't hear back. So we reached out to the senior managing editor, the VP of branded content, the book cover designer, and a handful of other people who work at the company. But nobody at Simon & Schuster responded to any of our emails or LinkedIn messages. So we started thinking about who else might have done business with Kari Asi.

And that's how we ended up talking to this guy. So I had been a kid who, when he discovered ninjas in the second grade, just went crazy for ninjas and samurai and started taking karate lessons. So Samurai Girl really jumped out at me. This is Luke McMullen. We found his name on the IMDB page for the Samurai Girl TV show. It's listed right up at the top of the page in the field that credits the creator, of the show. So the fact that he got back to us was pretty exciting because in the world of TV,

the person who's given that title is generally considered to be the person running the show. They're usually the person who writes the pilot episode. And when it comes to adaptations, they also tend to be the person with the closest relationship to the original author. So our hope was that Luke would be able to tell us who that person was, or at least who we needed to talk to to to find out. But we couldn't just come out and say, yo, tell us what you know about Cariusi. So we asked him to tell us the story of how he came to develop the show.

And in doing that, we did get the answer to our question, sort of. So I had just come off of alias and my agent sent me on meetings and one of the first meetings I took was with a production arm of a publishing company called Alloy Entertainment.

They had had a bunch of success with turning some of their book series into TV shows, so they were in the process of attempting to find writers to develop other book series that they had done. And Samurai Girl was a young adult

series, and don't have a copy in front of me, and I'm going to forget the name of the writer, but that's okay because the writer doesn't exist. Now, as you know, we had walked into this with the assumption that Carrie Asai was not a real person. But we also assumed that behind this made-up person was going to be a real person, a person who had come up with the idea for a character and a story that would eventually become the Samurai Girl novels that young Allison had become obsessed with.

But Luke seemed to be suggesting that there was no person behind this person. And I didn't really understand how that could be possible. Because someone had to have come up with the idea for Samurai Girl, and I wanted to know who that person was. That's a Bob Levy question. Okay. He was the one that was his job. Oh, okay. I mean, I believe he would be able to tell you who Carrey Assay is, if anyone can.

You may be wondering why we didn't ask, who's Bob Levy? And the reason is that we already knew who he was. In fact, we'd already scheduled an interview with him for right after this interview with Luke. The way we found Bob was much more circuitous than it needed to be, for reasons. we'll explain in a minute. But essentially what happened was that at some point in our search for the real Carious eye, we came across an article about how back in the 80s, there was this one guy who'd begun to suspect that the author Richard Bachman was actually Stephen King writing under a pen name. And eventually he confirmed it by going to the Library of Congress and calling up the copyright

info for each of Bachman's books. Turns out three of Bachman's books were registered to Stephen King's agent, and the fourth was registered to Stephen King himself. So we decided to to give this a try. We went online and ran a copyright search for all of the books credited to carry a sigh. But when the results came back, what we found was not the name of a person, it was the name of a company. The same company that Luke mentioned meeting with all those years ago, Alloy Entertainment, which is where Bob Levy, the guy we're about to interview, had spent more than a decade working as an executive. Now initially, it was unclear to us how Alloy was connected to the Samurai Girl series,

besides being involved with the development of the TV show. According to the company's Wikipedia page, Alloy is a book packaging and television production unit of Warner Brothers Entertainment. And if we had any idea what that meant, we would have realized that the answer to our question was staring us right in the face. We would have understood why Luke implied that there was no person behind this person, and why it's virtually impossible to say who actually came up with the idea for the series. Unfortunately, we completely misunderstood what book packaging actually was.

Book packaging has been around for 125 years, and most of us culture consumers and book readers have never heard of it. This is Bob Levy. He's a retired TV executive with an unbelievable track record for translating young adult book series into successful TV shows. And the second he started explaining the book packaging business, the whole mystery of the Samurai Girl series began to unravel. To the extent that I understand it, this guy named Edward Stratomire created the book packaging business model, literally in the 1890s. And his first hit book series was a series called The Rover Boys. And he was very successful with the Rover Boys. And so he went on in the 1920s to create the Hardy Boys. And the Hardy Boys were so successful, he had the great idea to say, what's a girl version of the Hardy Boys, which of course became Nancy Drew.

over and over again, Stratemeyer repeated this cycle, creating one successful series after another, including some of the most beloved and enduring young adult series of all time. But just because Stratemeyer created these series doesn't mean that he actually wrote them. The secret engine behind the success of the Stratomire Syndicate, which is what he called his company,

was a kind of literary assembly line designed to churn out books almost as quickly as his young audience could read them. Stratomire would write the outline of the, the plot, then pass it to one of his many ghost writers who'd flesh out the story, and then pass it back to Stratemeyer, who'd take a quick polish pass before sending it off to a publisher. Because Stratomire created the characters and the outlines for the series, and because the writers were working for a flat, contracted fee, he would keep the copyright for all of his books.

And because each of these series was written under a pseudonym, a pseudonym that Stratomire created specifically for that series, young adult readers could hold onto this idea that the Stories they loved were being written by one person, a person with whom they had a relationship, when in reality, some of Stratomire's series were being written by dozens and dozens of different writers. And that was a sort of fundamental business practice of the book packaging model for most of the model's history. So what does all this have to do with Samurai Girl? Well, to put it plainly, the reason that Alloy holds the concept, copyright for Samurai Girl is because Samurai Girl was created by Alloy, using the same basic

business model that Edward Stoddemeier created over 100 years ago. The only major difference is that instead of having one guy generating all the ideas for all of the series, Alloy's ideas are created by committee. The company's internal team has weekly development meetings to pitch and refine their ideas based on kind of broad mandates from the top of the company. For example, what's teenage sex in the city? This, Bob says, is how the company's been able to create some of the most successful YAA series of the last 20 years, including Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries,

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and Pretty Little Liars. And all of that is great for Alloy, but now that I knew how the sausage was made, I was starting to worry about my follow-up conversation with Allison. She'd sent me on this mission because she loved this book series. she loved it enough to care about its author, to want to read their other work and continue building this relationship

that began in her childhood. But there was no author, at least not in the way she thought there would be. And it was my fear that in the end, explaining to her the way this book had been created would be like telling her that her favorite movie was a commercial for shampoo. I imagined it breaking her heart.

And even though I knew I was probably just projecting, it wasn't how I wanted the story to end for her. And I felt like Bob understood how I was feeling. He told me that shortly after the Samurai Girl series came out, the company began to pivot away from the collective pseudonym model precisely because of the way that it limited the audience's relationship with the author. Now every book that's published by Alloy has the name of a real person on the cover. And in the interest of connecting Allison with the real person behind Samurai Girl,

I asked Bob, do you know who the author was for these books? I mean, Alice and our listener, who really loved the series when she was a kid, her specific request was to help her find the author. I know that there were two or three different writers, and I don't know who the two or three writers were, sadly. Oh, no. And my understanding is they wish to remain anonymous. Really? Yeah.

Huh. I'm sorry for your listener who is curious to connect with Carrie Asa. Bob was the top of the mountain as far as Samurai Girl was concerned, and the fact that he couldn't give us a name felt like the end of the line for us. I was disappointed, and I think Bob could see it. So before we got off the call, he said this. I will circle back to the people that I'm still in touch with at Alloy and see if I can do some digging and possibly off-camera slip you some information for Allison.

That would be amazing. There aren't a million samurai girl book fans out there. Right. So for that rare adult who remembers and still holds a torch for the samurai gold, I and my alloy friends will jump through some extra hoops for you guys. We'll be right back after the break. Welcome back to the show. Before the break, we met a listener named Allison,

who was recently inspired to look up one of her favorite childhood authors, and in the process of doing that, discovered that this author was missing. Carrie Asai hadn't written anything new. There was no information about her online, and for all intents and purposes, it was starting to seem like she didn't exist. So Allison came to us with a seemingly simple question. She wanted to know if Carrie Asai was real, and if she wasn't, she wanted to know who wrote the Samurai Girl series she'd loved as a kid. Our search had taken a pretty circuitous path, but eventually we learned that Carrie Asai was not the secret nom de plume of some secret author.

It was just a name, selected in a New York City boardroom by the executives of a book packaging company. It wasn't the answer we wanted to bring back to Allison. And Bob Levy, former executive at that New York company, seemed to understand how we were. felt. So he offered to do some behind-the-scenes digging to see if he could arrange a meeting between us and one of the series ghost writers. We thanked him and said goodbye, and in the meantime, we kept searching. A few weeks after our conversation with Bob, hyperfix producer Kat Shookneck popped into one of our meetings and said, I think I found one of the Samurai Girl writers, and you're never going to believe who it is. And about a week after that, Bob made good on his promise and confirmed

cat's theory that one of the writers on Samurai Girl was actually someone very famous, someone with a bunch of other books to her name, who also just happened to follow me on Twitter. It wasn't Stephen King, but in the world of YA literature, it might as well have been. I was so excited that somebody had read Samurai Girl at all. I had no idea. I had no idea people were reading Samurai Girl. This is Sarah Shepard. She's the author of more than three dozen books, including pretty little liars, a series that sold millions of copies and generated a TV series and three spin-off series.

Today she has the kind of career that she used to dream about. She can write what she wants and shares in the profits of her successes. And according to Sarah, none of it would have ever happened if it weren't for her experience writing Samurai Girl. My first gig was Samurai Girl. What? Really? Yes. My first gig was Samurai Girl.

Wow! Going into this conversation with Sarah, I was still a bit worried about what we were going to say to Allison. When we spoke to Bob about the pipeline that created this series, we'd only heard about it from the perspective of the executives. And I could very easily imagine a scenario where working as an unnamed, underpaid writer with no claim on the copyright of the books you'd authored could feel at best extractive

and at worst, completely exploitative. But the way that Sarah tells it actually shifted the way that I'd been thinking about this system. So I want to share it with you now. It all started in the early aughts. Sarah was in her mid-20s. She was living in New York and struggling to find writing gigs. The idea of getting paid to write novels

seemed so impossible it wasn't even on her radar. So instead, Sarah was trying to make it as a journalist. I was not a very good journalist. When I would interview people, I wouldn't like their quotes, so I would change their quotes. And I ran into a couple situations where the magazine had to post a correction. So then they never called me back. And I'm like, you know, I just, I really, I wish there was a world where I could write fiction. And my sister goes, you realize that my company does that. We hire ghost writers. And I was kind of like, wait, what? Sarah's sister was working as an intern at a company called 17th Street Productions, a company that would later become Alloy Entertainment. So anyway, I was like, well, tell me more. And she told me that they worked on a lot of book projects,

and sometimes they brought in authors to actually, you know, write the books. And it wasn't like I could just say, well, introduce me because she was just an intern and they weren't going to listen to her. But I kind of wedged my way in to talk to them. The company had Sarah write some sample pages. And based on the quality of that writing, they offered her a gig. They said, okay, we have a couple of projects. Do you care what you write about?

And I'm like, no, it can be absolutely anything. I will do research. I just want to try to do this. And the first thing they handed her was the story of a Japanese girl who became a hero to avenge her brother and discover her true identity. And I was like, okay, and you want me to write that. I was like, you've met me. I probably have this background. They said, yes, we know that this is obviously not your background, but okay, here are the books that you should order, just do a lot of research. And I was so afraid

that if I did not take the job, I would never get offered another one. So I ended up taking it. And I split the project with another writer. And unfortunately, I cannot remember what her name was. But it ended up being a samurai girl. Sarah freely admits that this was a ton of work for not a lot of money. But she also says that it was the kind of feat to the fire experience that taught her things she couldn't have learned any other way, including in her MFA program.

I loved getting an MFA, but I will say, writing the three books of Samurai Girl really taught me way more than, in some ways, way more than what I learned in the MFA program because I had to write that book. So I learned to like pace things properly and kind of create a three-act structure

and like all the things that you learn how to do when writing a novel. I hit the ground running and I just had to do it. I had no other piece of work to, like, prove myself, and they were just kind of, they believed in me. And, like, that was so cool. As for the question of writing under a company-owned collective pseudonym, which was something that we've been worried might be a tool for exploitation, Sarah had a very different take

on the situation. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't have a lot of confidence. I just wasn't clear on, you know, my ambitions or anything like that. And it just gave me this freedom of kind of like, you know, just try this. Like you have no stakes in, you know, your name isn't even on it, you know, whatever. So that was helpful to is that my name wasn't on. My name wasn't on it.

Ultimately, writing under a pseudonym allowed Sarah to try something she never would have tried before, something she didn't even know that she was interested in. And in the process of doing that, she found her life's passion. It was a meaningful series for me because it really made me realize that I really liked writing about that age group. I always thought I'd be writing about adults and adult problems, but to write about teenagers and the big feelings that teenagers go through and the frustrations that they face of not getting to kind of make their own choices and just sort of being stuck. I realized at the time, like, wait, I think. this is something I could be really good at. It shows that you can make really interesting and good art,

and it doesn't have to be necessarily coming from your own name. If the art exists, that's maybe what's most important. This is Allison again. After we talked to Sarah Shepard, we couldn't wait to get on the phone with her to tell her everything we'd learned. And she was super excited that we'd found an answer, and that Sarah had all these other books. she could read. But the thing that Allison was most psyched about caught me totally off guard.

So one thing I didn't tell you too much in our first interviews, I've been starting to do writing myself in my downtime with another friend. And I've always thought of how nerve-wracking it would be to publish under my own name. So hearing that there is a very successful author out there who went through the exact same thing, that's actually really cool to hear. Allison made her writing project sound pretty casual, but she and her friend have already written like six books based on their Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.

And it suddenly dawned on us why someone like Allison would be so interested in learning about the person behind the world she was reading about. And that's because Allison is a writer herself. But there was something else we realized, too. Initially, we thought that unmasking the real Carious Eye was the only goal of this story, that this whole journey had been about giving Allison something she needed. But after talking to Sarah, we realized that Allison could give back to her.

Because even though Sarah says she got so much out of her experience writing Samurai Girl, the one thing she didn't get was a way to connect with the readers of her work. She had written this book on assignment. and thrown it out into the world without ever knowing if it had landed. So hearing that Samurai Girl landed with Allison and impacted her so significantly that she'd come looking for the person who wrote it, it was its own kind of revelation. I'm just so happy that she was able to get something from them

and that she was able to reach out to you guys and find me. And I wish there would have been a better channel back then for readers to reach Carrie a sigh and talk about the books because I always would have been happy to. And realizing that these two people had given each other this weird kind of gift, we decided to take the story one step further, and we made Allison an offer. No pressure, but if you wanted to speak to her directly, she told us that she would be more than happy to get on the phone with you and talk about it. Oh, that would be so sweet. I mean, yeah, I would love to just to, say, hey, I really liked what you did with that. That's awesome. That's frankly amazing and so much

more than I sort of expected going into this, too. This episode of Hyperfixed was produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Kat Shookneck, Victoria Dominguez Peak, and Amory Yates. Our engineer is Tony Williams. The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. But unlike Cariousi, the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is not a collective, nor is that a pen name. That's just their name. It's on their birth certificate. Special thanks this week to Bob Levy, and if you are interested in learning more about the television development process, Bob Levy has an entire book about it called Television Development. You can get it anywhere you buy books. One last reminder that we are doing a live show on September 11th, 2026th, at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. You can buy

tickets at tickets.hyperfixpod.com. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks for listening. See you soon. Beotopia.