Eunice de Souza
THE JAPANESE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES by Kunal Basu HarperCollins, 2008, 202 pp., 395
May 2008, volume 32, No 5

Aparna Sen, who is making a film based on the title story of Kunal Basu’s The Japanese Wife and Other Stories is lyrical about the story in her blurb on the cover. ‘It’s an improbable and hauntingly beautiful love story, almost surreal in its innocence. And I immediately knew that this was the film I had to make.’

Sen is almost right about the story, but not quite. A rather filmy ending mars the delicacy of this story of a Bengali village school-master who ‘marries’ his Japanese pen-friend. They never meet, but she sends him gifts. The story opens with the arrival of a parcel of kite. ‘She sent him kites. They came in a trim balsa wood box—light as paper, but large. At Canning’s harbour, postmen admired the alien markings on its wrapper. ‘From where? Asked a new recruit. The experienced ones smiled.

Like a giant street sign, it rode on a cycle rickshaw, the hooting puller struggling to clear its delicate edges from the snarl of the dock. Then, it sat on a ferry, all tidy and proper, held by a proud mailman’.

Unfortunately, ‘The Japanese Wife’ is the only one of the twelve stories in the collection that works. They hardly seem to be by the same person. The situations are contrived, the dialogue stilted, the writing flaccid. Take ‘Grateful Ganga.’ Yoginder Singh, Importer- Exporter, is so terrified by the rocking plane (though he has flown frequently), that he and his neighbour, an American woman and a stranger, become ‘entwined, his head nestled in her tank top. Eyes closed, his right arm went around her seat.’ Is this believable?

Then there’s the utterly unreadable ‘Lenin’s Café’. ‘It was the first time I heard Lenin speak…. Arm extended, he appeared to weigh each word before pronouncing. “And we are talking about a revolution in deeds not in words. The dictatorship of the proletariat will decide who fights where.”’

Ugh! Eunice de Souza

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