BJ. William Plomer and Japan

	Plomer’s first two collections of verse, first collection of short stories, and second novel were written in and largely set in Japan. Many years later, in collaboration with Benjamin Britten, he produced a series of three remarkable formal appropriations of Japanese literary and dramatic forms that remain the most striking English-language adaptations of the nô. Plomer’s interlude in Japan constituted but a small portion of his life, but in the life of his work ultimately it became as central as his native South Africa and his adopted England.

William Plomer and Laurens van der Post arrived in Japan from Durban, South Africa in October 1926 aboard the steamer Canada Maru, to embark upon a fortnight tour sponsored by the Osaka company that owned the ship, in gratitude for assistance Van der Post had given two Japanese journalists who had been the subject of racist insults in Pretoria. When the Canada Maru pulled away from Kobe for its return to Durban at the end of the fortnight, however, Plomer was not on board. At 25, his most important asset a letter of introduction to Edmund Blunden, he had decided to remain in Japan. In the following months, assisted by Blunden and Ichikawa Sanki (Ap), Plomer secured first one and then a better teaching post at Tokyo, and found the city congenial for writing. He completed there his first collection of stories (3) and his second novel (5), both set in Japan, and the poems of his earliest collections of verse, Notes for Poems (2, 1927) and The Family Tree (4, 1929), both of which contain ‘notes from [the] Japanese landscape’. These volumes reveal an easy familiarity with the Japanese milieu of the twenties and an earnest interest in Japanese literature and cultural history, but also, more than other writing in English of the period, the growing sense of desperation in Japan as the state became increasingly repressive. By March 1929 Plomer had become concerned by the degree to which he was cut off from the world outside Japan, and in that month, with an ambivalence he recalled keenly for the rest of his life (see especially 12), he departed Japan for England and was never again in the country. Japan would return often to Plomer, however, through the remainder of his life, in poems through the years (see 7, 9, and 16), poignant recollections during and just after the war (see 11-13), the most fully-realised chapters of his autobiography (see 10, 12, and 24), and a late series of remarkable formal appropriations of Japanese literary and dramatic methods, in collaboration with Benjamin Britten, in the ‘parables for church performance’ Curlew River (18, 1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (19, 1966), and The Prodigal Son (21, 1968), still the most striking English adaptations of the nô. Plomer’s interlude in Japan constituted but a small portion of his life, but in the life of his work ultimately it became as central as his native South Africa and his adopted England.