The Bridge of Dreams

by Robert N. Lawson

ESTHER LUTTRELL

My Kansas author for the month of June, 2008, is Esther Luttrell.  She has been a friend ever since I took a course in Screen Writing from her five years ago.  I remember her best from that experience, and remember the book of hers that  we used in learning the formal patterns for a professional Hollywood film script, Tools of the Screen Writing Trade, especially well because I am working through it again in doing a Treatment and Film Script Version of the short novel I wrote two years ago (and have published on this web site), The Sequel, as my summer writing project.  That book is recommended by Scott Anderson, Director, Harvard Square Screenwriters, Boston, MA, in this sentence, "Esther's book has replaced all others and is my sole reference book for my students."  It was developed in the process of teaching screenwriting workshops in conjunction with other Hollywood film professionals across the country, which she has done for 14 years.  She uses an individual tutorial system that I hope to take advantage of by sitting in on her current Topeka workshop (beginning June 11) for the revision I am doing this summer.  I definitely recommend it for anyone interested in learning the trade who is within driving range of Topeka this June and July.  (For more information in this connection call or write Esther Luttrell at (785) 234-5674 or estherwrites@aol.com).

 ---------------

ESTHER LUTTRELL

But the book I am featuring this month is the novel we recently read in our reading group at Washburn, Murder in the Movies, which was orignally published in paperback in 2005, but was re-published in hardback and paperback in March of this year, so she again qualifies as a Kansas author with a book in print.  It is a murder mystery set in the Hollywood community,  a community which Esther knows well, having worked there in various capacities for years.  She always lets you know exactly where you are geographically, as her heroine, Katlin Wallace (who is "older than Rita Moreno, but not by much"--which is true for me as well) drives all over that end of California.  I grew up in Glendale, California, during the war and was pleased by how often I knew how to get home from  where I was while I was reading the novel.  The eleven members of our Washburn group were pleased to hear how every place used in the novel was either some place Esther had lived or worked, and that almost all the characters in the book were people she had known, some of whom she was getting even with (which led to other stories about these people).  Esther is a story teller, and this novel presents a very readable story, starring the woman forced to be a detective, Katlin Wallace (who is based upon herself), as she responds to an appeal from a friend to return to California from the Florida she called home at the time, to clear the friend's daughter, Lanie, once a well-known star, from the crime of having murdered her husband in an argument by shoving him down the stairs.  While never declaring herself a detective, as her husband was, Katie goes through the private eye experiences of receiving anonymous threats (and being beaten up twice) to get her to return to Florida, before she finally solves the crime.  The story is told from her point of view, which is the best thing about the novel, for she is a fascinating woman.  Its 300 pages are an enjoyable reading experience, and I think everyone in our reading group must be recommending it.  If you are interested in obtaining a copy, try your local bookstore, or Amazon.com, or Esther at the phone or e-mail listed above.  Or, if you belong to a group (wherever you live) ask her if she'll come discuss the novel with you--that's a rare experience in itself.
 

But I then decided to pursue, for the next five months of 2000, not the full tradition of Japanese literature, which that short book for high school students considers, but, instead, as with Mishima, availability.  I presented an overlapping  history of 20th-century Japanese fiction, generation by generation, through five more of its practitioners: Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) , Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965),  Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972--Nobel Prize, 1968), (Mishima (1925-1970) would come here), Abe Kobo (1924-93), and Oe Kenzaburo (1935-Present--Nobel Prize, 1994) .   I elected to do this because modern novelists are easier for an American reader to approach, these writers are all major novelists, all available in multiple titles in English translation, and, while very different from one another, form a tradition the reader can easily come to understand.  I added Dazai Osamu (1909-1948), and Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927), as two other important figures in my own experience of Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction, before beginning the more general review of Japanese literature.

In December, 2000, I began to introduce the longer tradition of Japanese literature by considering the monumental classic, The Tale of Genji,  written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu exactly 1000 years earlier.  Then, for 2001, I began the chronological consideration of Japanese Literature, from 712 A.D. to the present, by presenting the first Japanese book, the Kojiki, largely through my translation of a contemporary children's book presenting one of the well known stories from that classic, followed by my favorite Japanese poet, who lived in the tenth century, Ono no Komachi, and a third great Heian woman writer, Sei Shonagon, who wrote The Pillow Book.  Then I moved to the Medieval Period by presenting my translation of Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki (for which I have an increasing fondness the longer I live), then the better known medieval classic, The Tale of the Heike, the military epic of the Heike clan from 1153 to 1181 that established the samurai values in Japanese literature that then run from the Noh drama of a century or so later through the work of Yukio Mishima.  Then I offered Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), and the first of the three great Japanese theatre traditions, The Noh Drama, then the writer most closely associated with the development of the other two Classical Theatre Forms, Kabuki and Bunraku, in the following period, the "Floating World" of Tokugawa Japan, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, then the other two writers of the big three of that Golden Age of the Japanese Renaissance, the novelist Saikaku, and the poet Basho.  I began my close by offering the second item on Mishima, the Modern Noh play I wrote of that title, that was performed in four places in Kansas in 1983 (or that Jack and Jordan do in New York in 1973--before I wrote it).  Then I offered an essay I wrote a few years ago on the contemporary playwright Betsuyaku Minoru, four of whose plays I translated for my second Master's thesis in 1985, then another item on Mishima, an essay on his Forbidden Colors I presented at a professional meeting over twenty years ago.  I closed in December, 2001, with, a paper I presented December 8, 2001, at the Saturday Night Literary Club here in Topeka, Three Heian Women.

As I come back to work on this web site, the project I plan to take on in Japanese literature is a review of the early 20th century novelist Natsume Soseki.  I have revised the essay I wrote on him earlier, as part of the book on Japanese literature I planned for high school students.  Then I plan to review one of his novels each month, to complete a long essay (or short book) on Soseki,  since I now consider him the greatest Japanese novelist, and will be pleased to re-read his work.

To access the earlier essays on the Japanese authors named above, see Japanese Authors.

That was my game plan--modified en route.  As it happens, in the last two-thirds of my career at Washburn I found three largely extra-curricular activities (following Emerson's Law of Compensation) to replace the teaching experience in the Great Books of Western Literature I had watched evaporate around me:

1.   From the summer of 1973 to this very day I have been a student (and               sometimes teacher) of Japanese Literature (even if I've often neglected it).

2.   Then, at the beginning of Summer School, June 1, 1975, I began writing my novel, finally The Bridge of Dreams (but on that day the only thing I was sure of was that it would have 24 chapters).

3.   Then, with the death of Bob Woodley, in the summer of 1976, I became more active with local writers--as his surrogate.  We did the first Inscape published by Headwaters that fall (which contained the sonnet I now present as part of my comment on Bob).  In October of 1980 we established the Woodley Press in Bob's memory, which has now published over 40 books in this twenty-five plus years-- poems, plays and stories by Kansas authors--in most cases that author's first book.  In July, 2004, the Woodley Press published my Collected Sonnets (fifth edition), and it is still publishing one or two Kansas authors a year.

Robert N. Lawson	bridge24@washburn.edu
Washburn University
Topeka, Kansas   66621