- My Japan; The Honey and the Fire; Peaceful Circumstances, by Roger Pulvers. Balestier Press.
At the back of these books Roger Pulvers is characterised as an author, playwright, translator, theatre and film director. Listing those five vocations under-states Pulvers' standing as a polymath, his skills as a raconteur and his evidently insatiable intellectual curiosity. Filled with learning, brio and wit, each of these three books attests to those attributes.
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The Honey and the Fire advertises itself as a collection of "ancient tales re-told for our time". Many old friends from Bible class are given an encore: Job, "unchanged and unmoved"; Jonah, "dead to the entire world"; Esther, "creating happiness"; and Joseph, exploring "the corners of fate".
Traditional Bible tales are given new, wry twists. If Pulvers sometimes reveals a lower opinion of humankind than the Bible writers, he reveals his scepticism about us in a disarmingly simple, clear but witty manner.
My young grandsons enjoy these stories as much as I do, even if we laugh at different points.
Children and adults alike can enjoy Pulvers' re-telling of deeply familiar stories, not just because he reminds us of characters, predicaments and moral lessons we have learned before. Pulvers is re-crafting and re-focusing the tales rather than merely re-telling them.
My favourites include Pulvers' take on the Good Samaritan, where locals blame the road (a bit like Ben Okri's famished road) for the troubles which occur along its length.
An account of the Tower of Babel is transmuted into a sweet parable on tolerance. As for Noah's ark, the animals resolve to vote on whether to admit any humans on board. Here the grandsons were more amused that the deluge of the flood left the tiger's stripes "scrambled like runny eggs".
My Japan represents a dramatic shift in pace, from whimsy and play to extremely well-informed respect. While some writers find new insights and perspectives when appraising any facet of their own culture (take Ferdinand Mount on Britain, for instance, or Tony Horwitz on the United States), Pulvers never flags when describing a quite foreign culture - at least one adopted by an American living for long spells in Australia.
Pulvers' account of Japan is in no sense a conventional travelogue, one in which a passer-by collates or confects anecdotes to display their own discernment as much as any local feature. Pulvers' book reflects a deep dive, a most thorough immersion in Japanese language and the way the place works.
Pulvers first visited Japan in 1967, aged 23, and found himself "looking into a magic lantern" during a taxi ride in from the airport. His enthusiasm has not waned; every section of this book is buoyant, alert, observant and learned.
Pulvers' first intention is to discount as a caricature the so-called MASK notion of Japan, where M stands for manga, A for anime, S for sushi and K for karaoke. Despite his worries about modern Japanese "wandering in a fog of national diffidence", Pulvers detects many reasons for pride and optimism in Japan's "agglutinative" society.
Pulvers encourages the Japanese to "re-imagine and re-invent a unique and exquisite culture". He does a fair job of that himself, whether in opening up the story of the wanderer-adventurer Lafcadio Hearn, introducing readers to neglected Japanese (like the poet, Miyazawa Kenji, or an actor, Issey Ogata).
Outside the realms of high art, Pulvers seems just at home explaining the wonders of one deep muddy pond in Kyoto. Readers worried about learning to cope with self-isolation might be comforted that the Japanese coined a word for that condition before the event, "kikikamori". Talk of Japan as an insular, introvert country gains another dimension with that word.
A reader might then turn to a Pulvers' novel, Peaceful Circumstances, to sit alongside his analysis of Japan and re-construction of traditional tales (a book of short stories, looked at another way). The trio gives a reader little chance to assess the author's expertise in film and theatre, although elements of Peaceful Circumstances are both cinematic and theatrical.
Only a handful of excellent novels on the Vietnam war have been published. My list would start with The 13th Valley, then proceed through Going after Cacciato to The Quiet American. With Peaceful Circumstances, Pulvers has written an anti-Vietnam story, one dealing with an African American due to deploy from a base in Japan to the fighting, but anxious about going.
Vietnam is the backdrop and spring of the plot, but not its main concern. Instead of slogging through paddy fields or strafing from the skies, Pulvers' hero talks rather a lot, wanders about a bit, broods about going back to fight, and falls in love. The novel is more discursive and less satisfying than the two other books. Two out of three is still a treat.