Helen Dewitt - The Last Samurai

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 hes mature enough to know his fathers name

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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 firms London office. The Last Samurai is her first finished novel; rights to it have been sold in 13 countries. Helen DeWitt lives in London.

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.

Without the enthusiasm of Jonathan Burnham of Talk Miramax Books there would be a manuscript but no book; the extent of that debt speaks for itself.

I am grateful for permission to use copyright material from the following: The Biographical Dictionary of Film , by David Thomson, The Eskimo Book of Knowledge , by George Binney, by permission of the Hudsons Bay Company; Theory of Harmony , by Arnold Schoenberg, translated by Roy E. Carter (English translation 1983 Faber and Faber Ltd); interview with John Denver, Melody Maker 27/3/76, p. 11, Chris Charlesworth/ Melody Maker /IPC Syndication; Foundations of Aerodynamics: Bases of Aerodynamics Design , by Arnold M. Kuethe and Chuen-Yen Chow, 1986, reprinted by permission of John W. Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Half Mile Down , by William Beebe (Bodley Head); The Films of Akira Kurosawa , by Donald Richie (University of California Press), 1984 The Regents of the University of California; The Solid State , by H.M. Rosenberg (1988 Oxford University Press) by permission of Oxford University Press; Gesenius Hebrew Grammar edited and enlarged by E. Kautzsch, second English edition by A.E. Cowley (1910), by permission of Oxford University Press; Njals Saga (extracts from pages 244-246), translated by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Plsson (London, 1960) 1960 Magnus Magnusson and Herman Plsson, reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. I would like to thank Kurosawa Production K. K. for permission to reprint material from the screenplay Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai) .