T.S. Eliot may have written that "April is the cruellest month," but for Roger Pulvers, this spring is an extraordinarily felicitous one. In March, an English translation of his novel "Starsand" was published and in April, translations will be released of both an anthology of tanka poetry by Takuboku Ishikawa and "If There Were No Japan: A Cultural Memoir," an autobiography.
Meeting Pulvers on the 24th floor of the publishing company Kodansha's Tokyo office, his upright posture, lucid eyes and firm handshake belie the fact he was born in May 1944 — the same month the Imperial Japanese 11th Army launched its offensive at Changsha in China's Hunan province.
A more fruitful connection to Japan began for Pulvers when he stepped out of Haneda Airport in the autumn of 1967 and felt an "instant rapport with the grammar of Japanese culture," he says.