The Fox with the White Scarf
by
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He heard human voices and, for a moment, it seemed he was lifted up, and then set down. Water and food were forced into his mouth and his wounded shoulder treated. The pain stopped. A dream? Iwata didn't know and didn't care. He sank into nothingness and it was very comfortable there. He stopped thinking.
The voice was singing in a strange language. It was soft and clear and beautiful. Yes, that was it. So pleasant. Iwata opened his eyes. He was in a small dirt-floored courtyard, cleanly swept, and he lay on a quilt of some kind. His first impression was that he was quite comfortable, he was fine, and the singing voice pleased him. It was definitely a female voice.
Iwata spoke and, after a pause, laughter came from the singing voice, but not a laughter of disdain or ridicule. It was the kind of laughter that makes you want to chuckle along with it, even though you have no idea what the laughing is all about. But when the laughing stopped, and the voice answered, he knew what had brought on the laughing. For the voice answered him with sounds meaningless to him. It was Korean, the language of the garlic eaters. Iwata had spoken in Japanese and he now realized that he had sounded just as strange to the listener, the one who had laughed. He tried to sit up but a pain shot through his shoulder stopping him. The voice walked around to the front of his quilt bed and Iwata thought he saw an angel peering down.
Dolsun was indeed as beautiful as her voice.
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About the Book
There is an Asian faerie tale about a magical fox who wears a white scarf and talks to the humans, but only to those who are without guile. In our story, the myth of the fox with the white scarf is mixed with two wars and two romances almost four hundred years apart, but connected by blood and circumstance, love and honor, and a jumble of languages, nations and cultures.
The background is
About the Author
Joe Psarto was born in 1931, in
"Zohar and the Fox-girl," Joe's debut novel, was published in May, 2006, and it has been met with critical acclaim.
For most of his life Joe has read over fifty books a year, mostly novels, but also biography, history and poetry. He considers fiction to be capable of greater truth than nonfiction. For instance, what gives a closer picture of the evils brought on by the industrial revolution in
Joe considers the novel to be the greatest art form of all because of its ability to extend beyond time and space, for time and space may be exploited as the author sees fit. A split second may take five pages and a century but a sentence. Metaphor and allegory may be used to describe a character, a place or a situation as fully as the author wishes. On the other hand, a painting freezes but a moment in time, and that, too, is great art, but it cannot be as expansive as literary fiction, nor as capable of presenting the many faces of reality.
Literary fiction gives a reader the ability to reimagine the story being told and to enter into it seeking a solution for a personal dilemma. (The reply might be that there is no solution.) And a book can be picked up or put down at any time, its story paused, the universe suspended, and then brought back to existence.