Lea O’Harra

Lea O’Harra is the pen name of Wendy Jones Nakanishi. An American by birth, she spent seven years in the UK as a student. She was a ‘Junior Year Abroad’ at Lancaster University and later got an MA in eighteenth-century English Studies there. She got a scholarship to Edinburgh University where she was awarded a doctorate for her thesis on the topic of the poet Alexander Pope’s letters.

She arrived in Japan in the spring of 1984 and spent thirty-six years there, employed as a tenured member of staff at Shikoku Gakuin University.

On retiring in the spring of 2020, she moved to England. She has published widely in her academic field — critical monographs, articles and book reviews about both English and Japanese literature as well as creative non-fiction describing her life as an American academic living in rural Japan, the wife of a Japanese farmer and the mother of three sons.

Wendy Jones Nakanishi published her first crime fiction novel, entitled Imperfect Strangers: an Inspector Inoue Mystery, in August 2015 under the pen name of Lea O’Harra. It is available on Amazon (Sharpe Books, UK) in digital form and POD, as are her second novel in the Inspector Inoue mystery series, Progeny, appearing in July 2016, and her third, Lady First, in August 2017. In autumn 2017, Lady First was awarded “finalist” status in the crime fiction section of the Beverly Hills Book Awards.

She had a story entitled ‘Cold Comforts’ included in The Best Asian Crime Stories 2020, a Kitaab International publication edited by Richard Lord: an anthology of stories in Asian settings, ranging from Japan to Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and India. It was launched at The Singapore Writers Festival, held online from 30 October to 8 November 2020.

Click here to read more about the publication.

Click here to watch the YouTube video consisting of interviews of the authors of the short stories included in the publication.

In September 2022 Sharpe Books published Lea O’Harra’s fourth crime fiction novel. Entitled Dead Reckoning, it is a standalone murder mystery set in the American Midwest rather than in Japan.

Other Awards

In autumn 2017, Lady First was awarded “finalist” status in the crime fiction section of the Beverly Hills Book Awards. It was also a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards in 2018.