Dr John Granger and I will begin our Lake and Shed reviews of the twenty-one stories written at least in part by J. K. Rowling. In this introduction to our month long project to celebrate Mrs Murray’s 60th birthday, we explain the Japanese concept of Kanreki, 還暦, or calendar re-birth.
Join John, in his shed in Oklahoma, and me, by my lake in Wales as we kick off this exciting new series.
On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the source of her inspiration and the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and this birthday project at the first entry in this series of post:
Nick discusses Hogsmeade Comprehensive School, as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry should be properly called, and John explains the ten different genres that Rowling uses in Philosopher’s Stone:
John explores the Freudian parallels that Rowling paints into Chamber of Secrets, and Nick talks about her oldest, and probably best friend Sean Harris, the inspiration for Ron Weasley.
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