Josef Winkler approaches the life, death and funeral of his father from ever new angles – organizing a »wake« for his father and thus allowing this larger-than-life figure who dominated his childhood and his early works to rise up once again.

»Three years ago, when I and my family were staying in Tokyo, where we took up residence in the Roppongi district«, writes Josef Winkler about his new book, »my father died, aged 99. One year before his death, after discovering that in my last volume of prose I had scattered neither cornflowers nor peonies for a farmer from my home village, he informed me in a short but dramatic telephone monologue that when the day finally arrived I should not come to his funeral. When we found out about his demise I was standing in the Austrian embassy in Tokyo, in front of a pane of floor-to-ceiling glass. I was staring out at a pool of orange wakin fish when a heron with wide outstretched wings alighted on the edge of the pool. Well then, I thought, in this moment of mourning and happiness, my dead father has reappeared to me in the shape of a white heron before being put underground, with his long, thin red legs and his long pointed beak, now covered in soil, looking for worms for his future grave in Roppongi. His curse had been fulfilled, we did not travel back but stayed in Roppongi.«

The Serf