Books: Personal Publisher

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This famously funny novel, out of print for the last dozen years, is the work of one Roger Poidatz. who as a young French cartographer in 1922 ended a two-year mission with the Japanese government and crammed his impressions of the country and the culture into his one and only book. Poidatz took his pen name Thomas Raucat from the Japanese tomarō ka, meaning "Will you stay the night here?", which when asked by a hotelkeeper takes on a double meaning. Though it has hints of a French boudoir farce scored for samisen, the novel's double meanings are mainly of another sort — that of a Westerner looking at the Japanese looking at themselves.

The hero is a Swiss League of Nations observer bent on having one long extra-marital fling. The nameless heroine is a petite Japanese Mademoiselle Butterfly, who he hopes will prove a piece-de-non- resistance. But a series of Japanese throw themselves in his way, not to save her virtue, but his dignity, and above all Japan's face. There is a hotel proprietress who uncomprehendingly scalds him in the bath ("Honorable tepid bath . . . could not have been more than 113°''). There is a geisha who saves the hotel's honor by sacrificing her own ("I whispered only these words: seventy-eight yen fifty . . . It was the price of Kodak No. 3A. anastigmatic lens, shutter for both time and instantaneous exposures"). Time has retouched Author Raucat's Japan without cropping any essentials in his cultural snapshots. Few writers have probed more skillfully behind the deep bow and the polite smile for that web of obligations which keep the Japanese in a fine sweat between one-upmanship and one-downmanship. Fewer still have captured the pratfalls of Western emulation.

Admiral of the Sargasso

How COMMUNISTS NEGOTIATE ( 178 pp.) — Admiral C. Turner Joy, U.S.N. (Ret.) — Mocmillan ($3.50).

Communism is a philosophy of power, even when it lacks power; the West is committed to the pursuit of truth, even when it cannot be reached. When these facts are put together in a debate (which demands respect for truth) over an issue of war (which demands respect for power), the result is likely to be a Sargasso Sea of lies, confusion and boredom.

At Kaesong and Panmunjom that is just what happened. It fell to Admiral C. Turner Joy, U.S.N. , as chief of the United Nations Command Delegation to the Korean Armistice Conference, to navigate this viscid ocean of incomprehension.

Admiral Joy was commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Far East when he was detached from the happy duty of battering the enemy to the job of armistice negotiator. At the start, he still held the old-fashioned notion that a line might well be drawn at the points where the belligerents faced each other when one of them cried quits. The Reds said it should be the 38th parallel, which would have given them territory for which the Allies had paid in blood. And thus, a man who had nothing but an Annapolis education, the habit of command, and all the power of the United Nations, confronted men who had nothing but a million defeated men and Marxism.