Metamorphosis of an Author : Books: After 20 years, Patricia McFall of Garden Grove has transformed her experiences in Japan into “Night Butterfly,” a promising debut mystery novel.

Unable to find a stateside teaching job after graduating from Cal State Northridge in 1972, Patricia McFall wound up in Japan teaching conversational English. Her nearly two years abroad was a colorful adventure for the 21-year-old, who even filled in briefly for a friend as a hostess in a Japanese nightclub.

Twenty years later, McFall has tapped the exotic world of the “night butterflies,” as the Japanese refer to women who work in the entertainment districts, to write what Publishers Weekly calls “a promising mystery debut.”

Set in Japan in the early ‘70s, “Night Butterfly” (St. Martin’s Press; $18.95) is the classic story of an innocent abroad who finds herself caught in a web of intrigue.

Nora James, McFall’s heroine, is a graduate linguistics student winding up a year of research in Japan when she substitutes for a friend as a hostess in one of Tokyo’s elite nightclubs--a job, her friend assures her, that only requires her to light cigarettes, mix drinks, look attractive and chat with the well-heeled customers.

James figures the nightclub will be the perfect setting to secretly record guests using the traditional language for her linguistics research, and it is perfect--until one of the club’s customers, a corrupt businessman and convicted war criminal, mistakes James for a spy and has her kidnaped.

Japanese gangsters, radical terrorists, the CIA and a handsome young investigative journalist figure prominently in McFall’s fast-paced suspense story, which she began writing in a Cal Sate Long Beach extension writing workshop in 1985.

“Part of the reason I wrote about Japan is as a personal exorcism. It really made a deep impression on me to go there as a young woman,” said McFall, who did not speak the language when she arrived in Japan but quickly learned to speak conversational Japanese.

“I think that it meant a lot to me to kind of relive that experience of what it’s like to be in a completely different culture and to tell other people what that experience is like.”

McFall prefers to downplay her own brief stint as a “night butterfly” in a club similar to one in the novel. “I don’t like to make too much of that, because Japanese people really look down on that whole world. It’s like saying you were a hooker, although no sex is involved.”

McFall said the cultural roots of the hostess clubs, where business is often conducted, are the geisha tea houses.

In researching the Japanese entertainment industry, McFall discovered that “traditionally there wasn’t an opportunity at work or at school for men and women to interact--there are not a lot of opportunities to flirt with the opposite sex. How they function at the clubs is to have the hostesses flirt with you and wait on you. It’s not a sexual invitation.”

McFall said the need for such clubs is “starting to change with the younger generation. Younger people are more Americanized, if you want to call it that. The girls and boys feel freer with each other. They date now, so by time those people move up in a company, it won’t seem as attractive to businessmen to pay all this money” to talk to a hostess.

McFall said she chose to set her novel during the early ‘70s because “it was a pivotal time in the relationship between the two countries” and because her experience in living in Japan is two decades old. “I didn’t want to be anachronistic. I know how rapidly that culture is changing. I guess I’m a cautious person by nature, and I didn’t want to be wrong about too many things.”

“Looking back on it,” she added with a laugh, “I think I really had a lot of gall. There is only one main character who’s American in the book, and so I really had to kind of project in order to write Japanese characters, but I did base a lot of them on people I had met.”

To compensate for any mistakes she might make in describing Japanese culture, McFall said she also showed her manuscript to Japanese friends and asked for feedback.

Although she majored in English and had long written poems and short stories for her own pleasure, McFall had never taken a creative writing class before 1985: The prospect always seemed too daunting.

But at husband Jim’s urging--”Gee, you always read these things, why don’t you write one?”--she enrolled in a six-week, non-credit writing workshop taught by veteran Orange County writing instructor Raymond Obstfeld.

McFall, who was working full time as campus relations officer for the overseas study program at California State University headquarters in Long Beach when she began her novel, says it took her five years to write because she “fooled around about three years before I got serious.”

Two-thirds of the way through the book, McFall said, she “froze up.” She had her main characters sitting in a Japanese coffee shop and simply didn’t know what to write next. “I was completely frustrated,” she recalled.

Then Patricia Geary, her writing workshop instructor at the time, told her simply to “just go finish it.”

For inspiration, McFall checked out Eric Ambler’s first four classic suspense novels. “I wanted to see how he handled endings. They were all different, but I realized they all had something in common: the protagonist being glad to make it out of there alive.”

Thus inspired, she finished her novel four months later, sometimes working 18 hours a day.

McFall likes to joke that she got her agent, Nancy Love, by mail order. After looking at an agency listing in Writers Market, she sent her manuscript to six agents. “I had two offers, two no’s and two didn’t have time to respond,” she said.

One agent who offered to represent her “sounded clinically depressed. He was saying it takes forever and ever to sell a book. I thought, ‘If he sounds that way to me, how’s he going to sound to an editor?’ ”

She went with Love, she said, because “she very upbeat and positive. I felt like she was really going to do a good job representing me. I think you have to pick an agent you like and trust.”

McFall is now working on her next novel, an Orange County mystery involving a teacher of English as a Second Language, a missing Japanese student and Japanese organized crime in California. And she’s back in a writer’s workshop, a small critique group whose members include Orange County mystery writers Maxine O’Callaghan and Jean Femling.

“That’s helping enormously,” McFall said. “It’s really hard to be objective about your own writing. You . . . think you’re the worst writer in the world and nobody wants to read (what you’ve written), and other times you think ‘this is just fine,’ and it turns out it isn’t. It doesn’t even matter if you’re an advanced writer--you need useful feedback on your writing.”

McFall will sign copies of her novel from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Blind Moth Books, 4029 Ball Road, Cypress.