About the Book
Sibylla, a single mother from a long line of frustrated talents, has unusual ideas about child-rearing. Yo Yo Ma started piano at the age of two; her son starts at three. J.S. Mill learned Greek at three; Ludo starts at four, reading Homer as they travel round and round the Circle Line. A fatherless boy needs male role models; so she plays the film Seven Samurai as a running backdrop to his childhood. While Sibylla types out back copies of Carpworld to pay the rent, Ludo, aged five, moves on to Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, aerodynamics and edible insects of the world – they might come in handy, if he can just persuade his mother he’s mature enough to know his father’s name …
Helen DeWitt
THE LAST
SAMURAI
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Book I
1: Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Interlude
Book II
1: We Never Get Off at Sloane Square for Nebraska Fried Chicken
Chapter 6
2: 99, 98, 97, 96
3: We Never Get Off at Embankment to Go to McDonald’s
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
4: 19, 18, 17
5: We Never Go Anywhere
Chapter 10
6: We Never Do Anything
Chapter 11
7: End of the Line
Book III
1: 1, 2, 3
2: a, b, c
3: 9999997= 999993000020999965000034999979000006999999
Book IV
1: Trying to feel sorry for Lord Leighton
2: I know all the words
Chapter 12
3: Funeral Games
4: Steven, age 11
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
5: For David, with best wishes
Chapter 15
Book V
1: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
2: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
3: A good samurai will parry the blow
4: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
5: A good samurai will parry the blow
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
6: A good samurai will parry the blow
7: I’m a genuine samurai
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446424612
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 2001
6 8 10 9 7 5
Copyright © Helen DeWitt 2000
The right of Helen DeWitt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Chatto & Windus
Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 09 928462 6
To
Ann Cotton
THE LAST SAMURAI
Daughter of an American diplomat, Helen DeWitt grew up in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. She started a degree at Smith College and dropped out twice, the first time to read Proust and Eliot while working as a chambermaid, the second time to take the Oxford entrance exam. She read Literae Humaniores at Lady Margaret Hall, went to Brasenose College to do a doctorate in Greek and Latin literature then spent a year at Somerville College as a junior research fellow. In 1988 she started her first novel. Over the next decade she started work on around 50 other novels while working as a doughnut salesperson, dictionary text tagger, copytaker, fundraiser, management consultant and night secretary for a Wall Street law firm’s London office. The Last Samurai is her first finished novel; rights to it have been sold in 13 countries. Helen DeWitt lives in London.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 1991 Ann Cotton went to a school in Mola, a village in a remote rural district of Zimbabwe, with the idea of doing research on girls’ education. She ended up talking to two schoolgirls who had come 100 km alone to attend the school. It did not take boarders, so they were living in a hut they had built themselves. They considered themselves lucky because most girls could not go to secondary school, as fees were charged; they dropped out and got married at twelve or thirteen instead. Ann went back to Britain and started raising money for scholarships by selling cakes in Cambridge Market. She founded the Cambridge Female Education Trust in 1993. She persuaded the Body Shop to fund a hostel in Mola. She persuaded other organisations to fund scholarships for more schools, first in Zimbabwe, then in Ghana. She persuaded me to become a Trustee; I could not have finished this book if she had not said ‘Of course’ each time I said I would do something for CamFed as soon as I had finished my book. Information about CamFed is available from 25 Wordsworth Grove, Newnham, Cambridge CB3 9HH and at http://www.camfed.org.
Professor David Levene has made the book more interesting and less prone to error in too many ways to count; it is impossible to express my debt to his unfailing generosity. I owe more than I can say to my mother, Mary DeWitt Griffin, not only for moral and financial support, but for sharing her remarkable gifts over the course of many years. Tim Schmidt, Maude Chilton and Steve Hutensky have been extraordinary friends; they know how much I owe them.
Alison Samuel of Chatto & Windus brought a fresh eye and keen attention to detail to bear at a stage when both were much needed. I am also grateful to Martin Lam, author of Kanji from the Start, for advice on the Nisus program, and to Neil and Fusa McLynn for extensive help with Japanese; also to Leonard Gamberg for casting an eye over the atom, to Chris Done for looking at the astronomy in an early version, to James Kaler for kindly answering a question at the very last minute raised by Stars and their Spectra, and to Ian Rutherford for finding a Greek font at the postultimate minute. It should go without saying that they are in no way implicated in any mistakes that remain. I owe a special debt to the many people who helped me appreciate the achievement of Akira Kurosawa; the book would have been very different without their assistance.