John David Morley
Encyclopedia
Early life
The third and youngest child of the artist and sculptor Patricia Morley (née Booth) and John Arthur Elwell Morley, an officer in the British Colonial Service, John David Victor Morley was born “in something of a hurry on a bench in a third-class Chinese ward at the Kandang Kerbau Maternity Hospital” in SingaporeSingapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
. He grew up speaking Malay
Malay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...
amid an extended household of Malays, Javanese, Chinese and Indians, later commemorated by his mother in her memoir My Other Family: An Artist-Wife in Singapore, 1946-48.
At five, Morley experienced a formative culture shock
Culture shock
Culture shock is the anxiety, feelings of frustration, alienation and anger that may occur when a person is emplaced in a new culture.One of the most common causes of culture shock involves individuals in a foreign country. Culture shock can be described as consisting of one or more distinct phases...
upon the family’s relocation from tropical Malaya
Peninsular Malaysia
Peninsular Malaysia , also known as West Malaysia , is the part of Malaysia which lies on the Malay Peninsula. Its area is . It shares a land border with Thailand in the north. To the south is the island of Singapore. Across the Strait of Malacca to the west lies the island of Sumatra...
to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, before spending two years on Africa’s Gold Coast
Gold Coast (British colony)
The Gold Coast was a British colony on the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa that became the independent nation of Ghana in 1957.-Overview:The first Europeans to arrive at the coast were the Portuguese in 1471. They encountered a variety of African kingdoms, some of which controlled substantial...
where his father was helping to administrate the transition from British colonial rule
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
in soon-to-be independent Ghana
Ghana
Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...
. Educated at St George's School
St George's School, Windsor Castle
St George's School, Windsor Castle is a coeducational independent Preparatory School of some 410 children, aged from 3 to 13, in Windsor, near London....
and Clifton College
Clifton College
Clifton College is a co-educational independent school in Clifton, Bristol, England, founded in 1862. In its early years it was notable for emphasising science in the curriculum, and for being less concerned with social elitism, e.g. by admitting day-boys on equal terms and providing a dedicated...
, Morley graduated from Merton College, Oxford
Merton College, Oxford
Merton College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its foundation can be traced back to the 1260s when Walter de Merton, chancellor to Henry III and later to Edward I, first drew up statutes for an independent academic community and established endowments to...
with an MA in English Language and Literature in 1969. Later the same year he left England for Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, where he still lives today.
Career
While working as a stage-hand at Munich’s KammerspieleMunich Kammerspiele
The Munich Kammerspiele is a successful German language theatre in Munich. The Schauspielhaus in the Maximilianstrasse is the major stage.-History:...
in 1969, Morley received a call from a family friend, Nevill Coghill
Nevill Coghill
Nevill Coghill was a British literary scholar, known especially for his modern English version of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.-Life:...
, asking whether he wished to spend the coming months at the Puerto Vallarta
Puerto Vallarta
Puerto Vallarta is a Mexican balneario resort city situated on the Pacific Ocean's Bahía de Banderas.The 2010 census reported Puerto Vallarta's population as 255,725 making it the sixth-largest city in the state of Jalisco...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
residence of Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor
Dame Elizabeth Rosemond "Liz" Taylor, DBE was a British-American actress. From her early years as a child star with MGM, she became one of the great screen actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age...
and Richard Burton
Richard Burton
Richard Burton, CBE was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, six of which were for Best Actor in a Leading Role , and was a recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe and Tony Awards for Best Actor. Although never trained as an actor, Burton was, at one time, the highest-paid...
, as tutor to Taylor’s son Christopher Wilding. Morley would later recount his friendship with Burton and Taylor in a tribute published in Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
in December 1984, the year that Burton died.
In 1973, Morley was awarded a three-year scholarship by the Japanese Ministry of Culture to study at the Language Research Institute of Waseda University
Waseda University
, abbreviated as , is one of the most prestigious private universities in Japan and Asia. Its main campuses are located in the northern part of Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as Tokyo Senmon Gakko, the institution was renamed "Waseda University" in 1902. It is known for its liberal climate...
in Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
. His stay in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
would form the basis of his first published book, the fictionalised memoir Pictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
. A New York Times Book Review notable book which also featured in Time Magazine’s list of the “Best of ’85”, the novel was translated into half a dozen languages and became a bestseller in Japan.
From 1979-2000 Morley worked as a researcher and interpreter for the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation (NHK)
NHK
NHK is Japan's national public broadcasting organization. NHK, which has always identified itself to its audiences by the English pronunciation of its initials, is a publicly owned corporation funded by viewers' payments of a television license fee....
, as a freelance journalist for publications including The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, The Sunday Times Magazine
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
, The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
and Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler
Condé Nast Traveler is a US magazine published by Condé Nast. It has its origins in a mailing sent out by the Diners Club club beginning in 1953, listing locations that would take the card. It began taking advertising in 1955. In order to attract more advertisers, it became a full-fledged magazine,...
, and as a correspondent for the short-lived Asia Times
Asia Times
Asia Times was a newspaper launched in Thailand by Thai tycoon Sondhi Limthongkul in 1995. The newspaper hired talent from around the world to produce a regional English-language newspaper....
. During the 1990s, he wrote op-ed pieces in German for the feuilleton
Feuilleton
Feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles...
of the Süddeutsche Zeitung
Süddeutsche Zeitung
The Süddeutsche Zeitung , published in Munich, is the largest German national subscription daily newspaper.-Profile:The title literally translates as "South German Newspaper". It is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a relatively high circulation abroad...
.
To date, he has authored one collection of journalism and nine works of fiction, of which the most recent, The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
, was published in July 2010. Morley's papers are collected at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
Mugar Memorial Library
The Mugar Memorial Library is the primary library for study, teaching, and research in the humanities and social sciences for Boston University and Boston University Academy. It was opened in 1966. Stephen P. Mugar, an Armenian immigrant who was successful in the grocery business, provided the...
.
Novels
- Pictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
(1985) - In the LabyrinthIn the Labyrinth (novel)-Summary:Based on months of taped conversation with its real-life protagonist, In the Labyrinth is the fictionalized memoir of Hungarian-born, German businessman Josef Pallehner who, due to bureaucratic inertia and his own guilty conscience, gets lost for six years in a maze of eastern...
(1986) - The Case of Thomas N.The Case of Thomas N.- Summary :“Found by a police officer on a bench by the river” in an unnamed European city, a 16 year-old amnesiac boy is given the name ‘Thomas N.’ by state officials , before being diagosed as suffering from a “fear of anything that objectively demonstrated his existence”...
(1987) - The Feast of Fools (1994)
- The Anatomy LessonThe Anatomy Lesson (1995 novel)The Anatomy Lesson is a novel by John David Morley, inspired by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.- Summary :...
(1995) - Destiny, or The Attraction of AffinitiesDestiny, or The Attraction of AffinitiesDestiny, or The Attraction of Affinities is a novel by John David Morley. Beginning in 1934 and ending in 1990, the book comprises a psychological history of modern Germany over several generations.- Summary :...
(1996) - Journey to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
(2005) - PassagePassage (2007 novel)Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
(2007) - The Book of OppositesThe Book of OppositesThe Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
(2010)
Themes
Morley’s novels revolve around themes of love, loss, the quest for identity and the journey into the unknown. Almost, if not all, involve a protagonist’s assimilation into an unfamiliar culture, be it Japan in Pictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
, the unnamed city in The Case of Thomas N.
The Case of Thomas N.
- Summary :“Found by a police officer on a bench by the river” in an unnamed European city, a 16 year-old amnesiac boy is given the name ‘Thomas N.’ by state officials , before being diagosed as suffering from a “fear of anything that objectively demonstrated his existence”...
, the indigenous whaling-village in Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
, the literal New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
of Passage
Passage (2007 novel)
Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
, or the East German experience of the newly united Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
in The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
.
Identity
In a 1987 profile in The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, on the publication of The Case of Thomas N.
The Case of Thomas N.
- Summary :“Found by a police officer on a bench by the river” in an unnamed European city, a 16 year-old amnesiac boy is given the name ‘Thomas N.’ by state officials , before being diagosed as suffering from a “fear of anything that objectively demonstrated his existence”...
, Hugh Hebert singled out the identity issue. “Thomas N. never uses the word ‘I’, and that disappearance of the personal pronoun is also an important thread in Morley’s essay on the Japanese language," Hebert noted of a theme common to Morley's first three books. "In the Japanese book
Pictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
, Morley wrote in the third person, calling his young Englishman Boon. In the Labyrinth
In the Labyrinth (novel)
-Summary:Based on months of taped conversation with its real-life protagonist, In the Labyrinth is the fictionalized memoir of Hungarian-born, German businessman Josef Pallehner who, due to bureaucratic inertia and his own guilty conscience, gets lost for six years in a maze of eastern...
suddenly, a third of the way through, turned into a first person narrative — Morley went back and wrote it all as ‘I’. Thomas N. is a youth without qualities, a large zero in which the people around can write their own ideas.”
“Morley is an immigrant of the imagination” observed Richard Eder in his review of The Feast of Fools in The Los Angeles Times: “His cityscape, his celebrations, his meals, his very weather and noises are German. Yet his principal characters mount their national ladders into a universality that is sweetly particular.” Frank Kermode
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode was a highly regarded British literary critic best known for his seminal critical work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967 ....
echoed Eder’s notion in his tribute to Morley's Passage
Passage (2007 novel)
Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
twelve years later: “A remarkable feat of imagination and sheer narrative energy. What Morley has achieved is the apotheosis of the picaro
Picaresque novel
The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...
. The old style picaresque confined the hero to a single lifetime; Morley has burst free of such constraints and deals in centuries, with corresponding geographic advantages.”
Humanism
Informed by the specter of the post-war years and the era of division in GermanyGermany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, the unnerving bleakness of certain of Morley’s earlier books (the stark prison sequences of In the Labyrinth
In the Labyrinth (novel)
-Summary:Based on months of taped conversation with its real-life protagonist, In the Labyrinth is the fictionalized memoir of Hungarian-born, German businessman Josef Pallehner who, due to bureaucratic inertia and his own guilty conscience, gets lost for six years in a maze of eastern...
, for example, or the disturbingly ambiguous coda of The Case of Thomas N.
The Case of Thomas N.
- Summary :“Found by a police officer on a bench by the river” in an unnamed European city, a 16 year-old amnesiac boy is given the name ‘Thomas N.’ by state officials , before being diagosed as suffering from a “fear of anything that objectively demonstrated his existence”...
) gives way, over the course of his body of work, to a more hopeful, even profoundly life-affirming vision of the nature of existence, as evidenced in his narrator’s conjectural conclusions on cetacean physiology in Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
and on the cosmic implications of quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...
in The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
. Reviewing the former in The Sunday Telegraph, Matthew Alexander applauded the “rich spiritual-thematic explorations” of the book: “The whale legends and ancient traditions of the islands, the submarine lives of giant mammals connected by sound-telepathy
Animal echolocation
Echolocation, also called biosonar, is the biological sonar used by several kinds of animals.Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects...
across vast tracts of ocean... from these and many more images and experiences emerges a poignant kind of personal spirituality which leads Daniel to a new understanding of his own humanity.” As the author and translator Suzanne Ruta noted in The New York Times Book Review of The Feast of Fools: “Morley writes less as a moralist than as a celebrant.”
Love Triangles & Telepathic Lovers
At least half of Morley’s novels involve a triangular love affair, more commonly between two men and one woman (though in the PernambucoPernambuco
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...
, Brazil sequence of Passage
Passage (2007 novel)
Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
this template is reversed). Yet, in contrast to the love triangle of The Feast of Fools, in which the male lovers’ rivalry reaches comically ludicrous proportions (ultimately culminating, as Andy Solomon wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “with an excremental duel that would fall beneath the dignity of the grossest Animal House on any college campus”), those in The Anatomy Lesson
The Anatomy Lesson (1995 novel)
The Anatomy Lesson is a novel by John David Morley, inspired by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.- Summary :...
, Destiny, or The Attraction of Affinities
Destiny, or The Attraction of Affinities
Destiny, or The Attraction of Affinities is a novel by John David Morley. Beginning in 1934 and ending in 1990, the book comprises a psychological history of modern Germany over several generations.- Summary :...
and, most especially, The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
are emblematic of unusually happy, tender interminglings between three human beings united by mutual affection. “Morley’s observing eye,” wrote Christina Patterson in The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement
The Times Literary Supplement is a weekly literary review published in London by News International, a subsidiary of News Corporation.-History:...
, “though unfailingly cool, is capable of both wit and compassion and he has a good understanding of ‘that inequality which is in the nature of love', writing movingly of the tension between life and death, joy and pain.”
Telepathy
Telepathy
Telepathy , is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and has remained more popular than the more-correct expression thought-transference...
between lovers is also a common feature of Morley’s works, notably in Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale
Journey to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
, in which Daniel’s wife Kozue instinctively knows that he is near death, despite his being on the other side of the world at the time, via a mental connection seemingly akin to that of whales echolocating
Animal echolocation
Echolocation, also called biosonar, is the biological sonar used by several kinds of animals.Echolocating animals emit calls out to the environment and listen to the echoes of those calls that return from various objects near them. They use these echoes to locate and identify the objects...
in the deep. This trope attains a new dimension, though, in The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites
The Book of Opposites is a novel by John David Morley, a love story set in Berlin in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.- Summary :...
within the tripartite love affair between the "drifter" and sometime physicist Frank, the photographer Wilma Pfrumpter, whose peculiar gift of precognition
Precognition
In parapsychology, precognition , also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information or laws of physics...
results in an early career as a remote viewer
Remote viewing
Remote viewing is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means, in particular, extra-sensory perception or "sensing with mind"...
, and her husband Pfrumpy, whose training in Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism
Tibetan Buddhism is the body of Buddhist religious doctrine and institutions characteristic of Tibet and certain regions of the Himalayas, including northern Nepal, Bhutan, and India . It is the state religion of Bhutan...
, in part, holds the key to the mystery of why their car flew off the Glienicker Bridge
Glienicke bridge
The Glienicke bridge is a bridge on the edge of Berlin that spans the Havel River to connect the cities of Potsdam and Berlin near Klein Glienicke...
. The largely anonymous narrator of the novel, who styles himself the “observer”, even intuits a possible scientific raison d’etre for this phenomenon of lovers’ telepathy in evidence supporting the existence of quantum entanglement
Quantum entanglement
Quantum entanglement occurs when electrons, molecules even as large as "buckyballs", photons, etc., interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description , which is...
.
Writing as ‘highwire act’
The idea of writing involving a restive, dangerous commitment on the part of the writer is apparent in Morley’s work. Any catharsis found in the act of storytelling seems linked to the inherent risks involved, as evidenced by Boon’s descriptions of shodoJapanese calligraphy
is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language. For a long time, the most esteemed calligrapher in Japan had been Wang Xizhi, a Chinese calligrapher in the 4th century but after the invention of Hiragana and Katakana, the Japanese unique syllabaries, the distinctive...
in Pictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade
Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
, specifically in his comparison of the art of Japanese calligraphy to the violence of sumo
Sumo
is a competitive full-contact sport where a wrestler attempts to force another wrestler out of a circular ring or to touch the ground with anything other than the soles of the feet. The sport originated in Japan, the only country where it is practiced professionally...
or the ritual act of seppuku
Seppuku
is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai bushido honor code, seppuku was either used voluntarily by samurai to die with honor rather than fall into the hands of their enemies , or as a form of capital punishment...
:
- “When Boon knelt on the tatami in his cold bare room (for some reason the cold had a beneficial effect on shodo) and began to prepare for his calligraphical exercises, images of the ritual performance of seppuku would spontaneously come to his mind. Tense, a little excited, like a coiled spring, he mentally went through the motions of the strokes he intended to put down on paper, waiting until he was sure what we wanted and for the moment when he could do it. Now — and without thinking that he had already made up his mind to begin he found the brush suddenly dropping down onto the paper, almost of its own accord. The tip of the brush struck the paper with a slight jar. With a sense of shock he watched it cut a dense black swathe on the blank paper, irreversibly, he could no longer draw back. His pent feelings were released and began to flow down the page in the wake of the glossy ink.”
Described in a 2005 profile in The Observer magazine as a man defined “by his compulsion to ride his adrenaline”, Morley has, on several occasions, come close to death while discovering his fiction. Indeed, when asked by The Observer’s reporter “if he started out with nine lives, how many does he think he has left?”, Morley answered: “Four”. His numerous close calls include a 1973 skiing accident (in which he broke both legs, suffered an embolism
Embolism
In medicine, an embolism is the event of lodging of an embolus into a narrow capillary vessel of an arterial bed which causes a blockage in a distant part of the body.Embolization is...
and was on life-support for a week), a 1995 bout of malaria tropica
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
in Burma and Thailand
Thailand
Thailand , officially the Kingdom of Thailand , formerly known as Siam , is a country located at the centre of the Indochina peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is bordered to the north by Burma and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the...
, a near-drowning in a local lake in Munich in 2001 on account of a stenosis
Stenosis
A stenosis is an abnormal narrowing in a blood vessel or other tubular organ or structure.It is also sometimes called a stricture ....
of the aorta
Aorta
The aorta is the largest artery in the body, originating from the left ventricle of the heart and extending down to the abdomen, where it branches off into two smaller arteries...
, and two subsequent experiences of open heart surgery
Open Heart Surgery
Open Heart Surgery was released on August 8, 2000 by rock band Virginwool. The band signed to Breaking/Atlantic Records after initially beginning signed to Universal Records. The album was produced and mixed by Brad Wood....
, the latter an emergency operation conducted by a doctor who declared his patient to be “a medical miracle”. “When I sit down and get seriously into a book, my pulse rate rises considerably,” Morley has said. “You cannot live a safe life and an interesting one in this profession. Writing is a frightening business.”
External links
- http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/12/travel/glimpsing-japan-s-hidden-face.html ‘Glimpsing Japan’s Hidden Face’ by John David Morley, The New York Times (May 12, 1985)
- http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/02/books/summer-reading-travel.html Review of Morley’s Pictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
(The New York Times Book Review, June 2, 1985) - http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1050502-1,00.html Review of Morley’s Pictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water TradePictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.- Summary :...
(Time Magazine, August 19, 1985) - http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/access/660437681.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jul+23%2C+1986&author=Robert+Taylor%2C+Globe+Staff&pub=Boston+Globe+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=63&desc=ENTERING+A+KAFKAESQUE+PRECINCT+OF+PAIN Excerpted review of Morley's In the LabyrinthIn the Labyrinth (novel)-Summary:Based on months of taped conversation with its real-life protagonist, In the Labyrinth is the fictionalized memoir of Hungarian-born, German businessman Josef Pallehner who, due to bureaucratic inertia and his own guilty conscience, gets lost for six years in a maze of eastern...
(The Boston Globe, July 23, 1986) - http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/13/books/mind-without-memory.html Review of Morley’s The Case of Thomas N.The Case of Thomas N.- Summary :“Found by a police officer on a bench by the river” in an unnamed European city, a 16 year-old amnesiac boy is given the name ‘Thomas N.’ by state officials , before being diagosed as suffering from a “fear of anything that objectively demonstrated his existence”...
(The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1987) - http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/30/books/in-the-steps-of-the-haiku-master.html Morley’s review of On the Narrow Road: Journey into a Lost Japan by Lesley Downer (The New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1989)
- http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review--war-crimes-with-leisure-centres-the-wages-of-guilt--ian-buruma-cape-1899-pounds-john-david-morley-on-a-new-study-of-the-spectacular-careers-of-germany-and-japan-1414225.html Morley’s review of The Wages of Guilt by Ian Buruma (The Independent, July 16, 1994)
- http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/boston/access/21329753.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Jan+18%2C+1995&author=Robert+Taylor%2C+Special+to+the+Globe&pub=Boston+Globe+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=25&desc=Morley%27s+heavy+%60Feast%27+puts+myth+in+Munich Excerpted Review of Morley's The Feast of FoolsThe Feast of FoolsThe Feast of Fools is a novel by John David Morley, a neo-Joycean translation of the Greek myth of Persephone to contemporary Munich.-Summary :...
(The Boston Globe, January 18, 1995) - http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17534523.html Excerpted Review of Morley's The Feast of FoolsThe Feast of FoolsThe Feast of Fools is a novel by John David Morley, a neo-Joycean translation of the Greek myth of Persephone to contemporary Munich.-Summary :...
(World Literature Today, June 22, 1995) - http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/books/adrift-in-amsterdam.html Review of Morley’s The Anatomy LessonThe Anatomy Lesson (1995 novel)The Anatomy Lesson is a novel by John David Morley, inspired by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.- Summary :...
(The New York Times Book Review, September 10, 1995) - http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/28/books/new-noteworthy-paperbacks-002917.html Brief Review of Morley's The Feast of FoolsThe Feast of FoolsThe Feast of Fools is a novel by John David Morley, a neo-Joycean translation of the Greek myth of Persephone to contemporary Munich.-Summary :...
(The New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1996) - http://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/21/books/all-germans-look-alike.html Morley’s review of The Captain’s Fire by J. S. Marcus (The New York Times Book Review, April 21, 1996)
- http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/reviews/971005.05morleyt.html Morley’s review of Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 1997)
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/25/fiction.hermanmelville Review of Morley’s Journey to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
(The Observer, September 25, 2005) - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/fiction/article590759.ece Review of Morley’s Journey to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the WhaleJourney to the End of the Whale is a novel by John David Morley, a book that almost killed its author in the making.- Summary :Swiss orphan, insurance agent and amateur marine biologist Daniel Serraz free-floats with life’s currents until a traumatic midlife episode sends him on a journey of...
(The Times, November 20, 2005) - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/fictionreviews/3668314/Confessions-of-a-500-year-old-man.html Review of Morley’s PassagePassage (2007 novel)Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
(The Sunday Telegraph, September 30, 2007) - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/passage-by-john-david-morley-926539.html Brief Review of Morley’s PassagePassage (2007 novel)Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
(The Independent, September 14, 2008) - http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/paperbacks-passage-by-john-david-morley-934877.html Brief Review of Morley’s PassagePassage (2007 novel)Passage is a novel by John David Morley, the story of a 500 year-old man’s journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.- Summary :...
(The Independent, September 19, 2008)