The Seed and the Sower The Seed and the Sower The Seed and the Sower is a book by South African writer Laurens van der Post, consisting of three interrelated stories blended into a novel, first published in 1963. The novel was filmed in 1983 as "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence", directed by Nagisa Oshima and starring David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano. The first story is set in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Java during World War II and is a first person account of the relationship between John Lawrence, a British officer, and Sergeant Hara, one of the camp’s
Laurens van der Post white South African has never consciously believed that the native should ever become his equal." But he predicted that "the process of leveling up and inter-mixture must accelerate continually ... the future civilization of South Africa is, I believe, neither black or white but brown." In 1931 he returned to England. His friend Plomer (see above) had been published by the Hogarth Press, a business run by Leonard Woolf and his wife, the novelist Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs were members of the literary and artistic Bloomsbury group, and through Plomer's introductions, van der Post met figures such as Arthur Waley,