Roger Pulvers

Early years

Pulvers was born into a Jewish-American family in Brooklyn, New York on 4 May 1944. Soon after birth, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up, attending Burnside Ave. Elementary School, Louis Pasteur Junior High School and Alexander Hamilton High School, at which he was Student Body President.

Pulvers took part in the Democratic National Convention, held in Los Angeles in 1960, where John F. Kennedy was nominated for the presidency. His position was Head of Youth for Stuart Symington, senator from Missouri and also a candidate for the nomination.

Early exposure to show business came from annual trips in the 1950s to Las Vegas, where Pulvers saw dinner shows of The Ritz Brothers, Sammy Davis Jr. and other entertainers. Also, his father, Louis (1903–1993), had worked as a lighting technician at Warner Bros. during and after the war, bringing home piles of glossy enlargements of actors on set. His mother, Miriam (1912–2006), had been secretary to William S. Klein, lawyer for the Shubert brothers, owners of New York theatres. In her later years she became private secretary to Bette Davis.

Education

Pulvers was an undergraduate at UCLA, completing the four-year course in three years with a major in Political Science, summa cum laude.

After graduation in June 1964, he went to Bloomington, Indiana to attend a Russian-language intensive course, going from there to Finland, the Soviet Union and Italy. In the Soviet Union he travelled extensively, visiting Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Yalta, Riga, Leningrad and Novgorod.

In September 1964 he entered the Russian Area Studies Program at Harvard University Graduate School, living on campus at Perkins Hall. He completed the two-year Master's Course in one year, receiving his MA with a thesis on "The Planning of Soviet Science.”

Pulvers spent the summer of 1965 in the Soviet Union, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland, returning to UCLA to further his studies of Eastern Europe and to study Polish. In September 1966, he went to Poland to do post-graduate work at Warsaw University on a scholarship from the National Students' Association (NSA) of the United States. While there, his interests turned away from political science to film and theatre, thanks to almost daily visits to the theatres and cinemas of that city. In January 1967 he moved to Krakow but was soon to leave Poland due to a scandal involving the NSA and the CIA. Though he was entirely innocent of any connection with the latter organization, he felt that he would never be able to return to Poland or the Soviet Union. He spent three months in Paris attending classes at the Sorbonne until his return to Los Angeles in May 1967. In September of that year he left the United States for Japan.

Career

In the late autumn of 1967, after spending four weeks in Korea to change his visa, Pulvers took up a lectureship in Russian and Polish at Kyoto Sangyo University. He spent five years in Kyoto teaching at that university and at Doshisha University, where he conducted a course in American poetry.

In 1969 he published his first book, a collection of short stories under the title "On the Edge of Kyoto." This was followed in August 1970 by the publication of a short play in Japanese translation, "The Perfect Crime of Mrs. Garigari", in the leading drama magazine, "Shingeki." In 1972 he was one of the winners of an essay contest sponsored by the Mainichi Shimbun. This led to the publication of the essay, "Kenji Isn't Here Now." This was Pulvers' first published work about Japanese author and poet Miyazawa Kenji; and it prompted a long association with the Mainichi Daily News.

In August 1972 Pulvers travelled to Australia for the first time to take up a lectureship in Japanese at the Australian National University in Canberra. It was not long before he was writing articles and stories for The Canberra Times, The Australian, The National Times, Newsweek and other publications, as well as doing regular radio broadcasts for a programs on the ABC. He also produced and directed plays in Canberra. His own plays were produced in Melbourne, Adelaide, Newcastle and Canberra. On 6 July 1976 he became an Australian citizen.

During the 1970s, Pulvers frequently went back to Japan to continue his involvement in Japanese arts and to be with his many friends who were their practitioners. He became particularly intimate with novelist/playwright Inoue Hisashi, at whose home he stayed. Pulvers also travelled to Europe, especially to Poland, where he was greeted in 1970 by film director Andrzej Wajda. His close friendship with Wajda has continued over the years.

In January 1980 Pulvers left the ANU to become Writer-in-Residence at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne. It was at the Playbox that he directed his own work and that of other playwrights. In the summer of 1982, Pulvers went to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to be assistant to director Oshima Nagisa on the film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." After that he returned to Japan to take up the position of literary editor at the Mainichi Daily News in Tokyo.

In April 1983 he married Susan Nicholas. They had four children, three of whom are now artists. Since the 1980s, Pulvers has published hundreds of articles in the Japanese and world press (the Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Scientist, etc.), as well as books of fiction, non-fiction and translations from Japanese. He has appeared frequently on Japanese television and radio, and acted in the NHK Taiga Drama, "Sanga Moyu.”

Since the early 1990s, Pulvers has divided his time primarily between Tokyo and Sydney, with frequent trips to Europe, particularly Poland, Ireland and the U.K. From 1996–1999 he was a professor at Kyoto Zokei Geijutsu University; and from 1999, professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he was Head of the Centre for World Civilizations. He retired in 2013 to devote himself entirely to his writing.

In Tokyo he continued to write articles, including his weekly column, Counterpoint, in The Japan Times, to publish books of fiction and non-fiction, to direct in the theatre, to write screenplays and to act in film. In Australia he most recently directed at the Roxy Theatre in Leeton his translation/adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's "The Government Inspector.”

He wrote the script and directed the feature film of "STAR SAND” on location in Okinawa in 2016. The film is released in Japan in the summer of 2017.

Awards

Awards and honors include the Crystal Simorgh Prize for Best Script at the 27th Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran for "Best Wishes for Tomorrow ( Ashita e no Yuigon)" the Miyazawa Kenji Prize in 2008, the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2013 and the Inoue Yasushi Prize in 2015. Pulvers was also an official member of Prime Minister Jun'ichiro Koizumi's Task Force on Public Diplomacy and in 2009 received the Award of Commendation from the Cultural Affairs Agency (Bunkacho) for contributing to the propagation of Japanese culture overseas.

Works in English

For those and other stories by Miyazawa Kenji see:

Books in Japanese

Books in French