In Modern Japan

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30633, 26 December 1964, Page 4

In Modern Japan

The Japanese Umbrella. By

Francis King.

Longmans.

212 pp.

Facets of life in modern Japan are skilfully presented in this book of short stories. The author was Regional Director of the British Council in Kyoto for nearly five years from 1958, and though his early impressions of the country were unfavourable he came to have an affection for it, and for many of the diversified types which go to its make up. Neither does he hesitate to make some quiet ironical fun at the expense of his compatriots. In “The collectors” he pillories the compulsive bargain-hunter of Japanese artifacts, while “A sentimental education” is a compassionate study of a Japanese student whose benefactors, an English couple, laughingly launch him on his first loveaffair with crass disregard J for its consequences. The most tenderly drawn of his Japanese portraits is the gentle tag-quoting Anglophile

Professor Kuroda, whose picture of the England he longed to visit was firmly fixed in the Victorian era, and whose cocktail-party contact with an aggressive visiting M.P., and other modern British types, destroyed tins image, leaving him bewilder ed and disillusioned. This story “A corner of a foreign field” is perhaps the best of a brilliant collection. Other notable ones are the “Fiery furnace" —a grim re--11 minder in the shape of a ■ Japanese boy and girl of the horrors of Hiroshima, and ‘L’acte gratuite’ a delightful • little comedy of the wellborn Japanese kleptomaniac, whose suicide saved him from disgrace and prison, and whose brother gratefully pressed upon the narrator as a memento of the deceased esteem for him, a pair of cuff-links which happened to be his own property. There is a stamp of authenticity about these stories, some of which have appeared in vardous magazines, including the rCornhill."