Poor Butterfly

THE WOODEN PILLOW--Carl Fallas-- Viking ($2.50).

According to Pearl Buck, the Chinese are akin to Americans, the Japanese to the English. This theory might explain why the U. S. has never taken the Japanese seriously, likes to regard them as a comic-opera race. It might also partly account for the delicate sympathy of The Wooden Pillow, whose author is an Englishman. But even the most arrant xenophobe could find little to feed his fears on and much to touch his Western conscience in Carl Fallas' gossamer tale. Japanese travel bureaus would be shrewd to boost The Wooden Pillows sales. Cynics may suspect that the land Author Fallas writes of is more Utopian than Japanese, but even cynics will succumb temporarily to its charm.

When Grier, a young Englishman on his travels, arrived in Japan, Tokyo's streets were still full of rickshas. Though Japan had beaten Russia and was beginning to emulate the West in other ways, its civilization was still essentially Oriental. Grier found it a quaint, delightful country. Its manners charmed, its emotions baffled, its women fascinated him. To his discovery that "in their attitude to sex the Japanese are a millennium ahead," a skeptical fellow-foreigner retorted that emotionally they were an incarnation behind. Grier could not be sure, set himself to solve the puzzle by falling in love right & left.

O Kaya San, who lived next door to Grier in the hotel, first attracted his attentions. But when he found his progress imperceptible he went to see Chika. an acrobat who had traveled from Europe on his boat. Chika's villainous father wanted to sell her to Grier, and she would not really have minded, but since Grier did not fall in with the idea she let her father put her in a brothel. Grier soon forgot her when he met O Setsu San. the lovely interpreter at an inn called The House of the Playful Kitten. Then an earthquake unexpectedly advanced his suit with his first love, O Kaya San. Soon they were living together. When Grier went back to England, because it was "necessary." he was better able to judge the depth of Japanese emotions.

Readers will remember not so much the Poor Butterfly story as the blossomy scenes it hovers over: the floating teahouse in the bay; the teacher, the day after the earthquake, holding her class in decorum in the field next to the ruined schoolhouse; the geisha delighting her audience by the entire gamut of tears; the hotel-keeper's children playing gravely with falling petals; the play, lasting from noon until midnight, in which the actors pantomimed and the voices came from the wings; the student serenely explaining that kissing was "not very high-class love."

The Author. Big-nosed, sleepy-eyed, bespectacled Carl Fallas is 50. At 15 he went to work in a newspaper office in Manchester, chucked his job after six years to go to the East, traveled 50,000 miles in five years. One of these years he spent quietly, observantly in Japan. Stranded in San Francisco, he shipped aboard a windjammer, worked his 20,000-mile passage around Cape Horn to Liverpool. The World War took him as a private, left him a gassed officer. After the Armistice he went back to journalism. Last Christmas he left Fleet Street for good, went to the country to write more books.

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