The Charter: And Thirteen Other Stories about Japan

Roger Pulvers has been writing fiction set in Japan for over fifty years. Now for the first time a collection of his very best short stories has been brought together in a single volume. Some of these stories like the one that gives the collection its title The Charter tells the story of a man who has chartered a boat on Tokyos Sumida River. He is celebrating his eightieth birthday and has invited his entire family to celebrate with him. But curiously it is a little girl engaging with him on the deck who comes to symbolize the real love that seems absent in his loved ones. The two make a promise to each other there and then that represents another kind of charter.The great variety of characters encountered in these poignant and often highly humourous stories include a little boy who it seems will stop at nothing to get his feuding parents together again; a young woman who reconnects with an ancestor and finds love in the process; a beautiful Japanese singer who goes to Las Vegas to make it big time; a Japanese salaryman who on an impulse travels to Holland in search of Vermeer and loses himself instead; a naïve American who falls for a young Japanese woman only to have to witness her modelling in the nude for a dissolute artist he despises; two young women - one Japanese the other Indonesian - who discover that they have the same father ... and other colourful characters that give great insight into contemporary Japanese life.