Book for Japan

Press, 17 November 1982, Page 28

Book for Japan

From BRUCE ROSCOE - in Tokyo “I'm an opossum. Don’t call me a rat! That would be a mistranslation.” So says the hunted marsupial as „he introduces himself in perfect Japanese to readers of “Son of a Kiwi!”

Hugh Whittaker, aged 25, is the hunter and the son. A New Zealand student in Tokyo, he wrote the book to tell Japanese what it is like to grow up in New Zealand by recounting events of his childhood.

Published in July by Kindai Bungei with the help of a grant from the. New Zealand Japan Foundation, “Kiui no Musuko” isbelieved to be the first book written by a New Zealander in Japanese. “Japanese tend , to look at Western countries as one unit. We are always portrayed as being so rational. I wanted to show through the book that we . are not all

Americans,” says Whittaker. He lets an opossum and a rabbit give first-person accounts of how their ancestors arrived and why the descendants are running for their lives, and interestingly interlaces his own anecdotes with Maori mythology explaining the country’s beginnings. .Whittaker .humotojisly- relates essentially New Zealand rural conditions and experiences, among them the out-house toilet that was spooky at night, a boyish attempt to get rich by collecting fungi, a run in with a farm bulk using chains to get a car out of mud,. daring friends to buy beer at a hotel.

He has -been ■ studying Japanese ' affairs at International Christian University in Tokyo since 1978, and says he may return to New Zealand to teach Japanese at a teachers’ training college.