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.

[1] The novel was filmed in 1983 as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, directed by Nagisa Ōshima.

[2] The first story is set in a Japanese administered POW 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 senior guards.

The final segment is Lawrence’s reminiscence of a brief affair with a woman whose name he never learned, shortly before his imprisonment by the Japanese.

This article about a World War II novel first published in the 1960s is a stub.