by Morris West
MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.
After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.
Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.
West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.
Morris West died at his desk in 1999.
THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION
FICTION
Moon in My Pocket (1945,as Julian Morris)
Gallows on the Sand (1956)
Kundu (1957)
The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)
The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)
The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)
The Devil’s Advocate (1959)
The Naked Country (1960)
Daughter of Silence (1961)
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)
The Ambassador (1965)
The Tower of Babel (1968)
Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)
The Salamander (1973)
Harlequin (1974)
The Navigator (1976)
Proteus (1979)
The Clowns of God (1981)
The World is Made of Glass (1983)
Cassidy (1986)
Masterclass (1988)
Lazarus (1990)
The Ringmaster (1991)
The Lovers (1993)
Vanishing Point (1996)
Eminence (1998)
The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)
PLAYS
The Illusionists (1955)
The Devil’s Advocate (1961)
Daughter of Silence (1962)
The Heretic (1969)
The World is Made of Glass (1982)
NON-FICTION
Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)
Scandal in the Assembly
(1970, with Richard Frances)
A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)
Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.
This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by William Heinemann Ltd
Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1991
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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Circus. A place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.
The Devil’s Dictionary
Ambrose Bierce
(1881–1911)
Contents
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the help and advice of many friends in the international communities of diplomacy and finance. These are sensitive professions, so my informants have preferred to remain anonymous.
One benefactor I can name, however, is my dear friend David Ashley-Wilson, boon companion on my last working visit to Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan. My thanks to him and to all the others who offered the courtesy of their houses and the gifts of their experience.
M.L.W.
One
It was not the best of times. The Iraqis had taken over Kuwait. The Americans had begun pouring troops and armour into Saudi Arabia. There was an odds-on chance of full scale war in the immediate future. The Nikkei Index had dropped through the floor. The shockwaves of recession were being transmitted to every stockmarket in the world. For the moment, however, I was far removed from these harsh realities.
I was a guest at Kenji Tanaka’s country house, in the uplands of Nagano province, an old princely estate, cradled inside the rim of an ancient volcano. The morning after my arrival my host handed me a thick document written in Japanese, then took off for Tokyo in his helicopter. I settled myself in the old tea-house by the lake and began to work through the papers.
It was the season called maples-in-flame. The sky was ice-blue, flecked with wisps of cloud against which the crags of the crater rim rose black and threatening. Among the high peaks the air was cold; but in the deep hollow of the basin it was warm and still. The lake, girdled by garden plots and stubble land, lay mirror-smooth, gleaming like old lacquer. Along the footpath that led from the lake to the dwelling, the colours of the maples flowed russet and gold and crimson, a runnel of fire through the dark thickets of the pinewoods. After the ant-heap scurry of Tokyo and Osaka, the solitude was a balm to the spirit.
There had always been for me a curious melancholy about the Japanese landscape, a melancholy heightened by the tortured formalism of life and custom; but here in this hidden valley, the sadness seemed less. Even the black cloud which had settled over me since my wife’s death lifted a little, to show at the fringes a faint gleam of silver.
All my friends, even my children, in their own grief, had promised me that time would heal the heart and work would dull the heartache. But I had found all too soon that time dragged and work was a drug that left me in the end with a long, red-eyed hangov
er. Nonetheless, Tanaka’s document was more than work. It was – at least, it could be – the challenge of a lifetime. By lunchtime I had still only digested the preamble. By late afternoon I had skimmed the whole document – dense, closely reasoned and heavily qualified in Japanese corporate style – and was convinced that the notion was hugely exciting. I was still trying to come to terms with the stretch and scope of it when I heard the clatter of rotors. Tanaka’s helicopter was spiralling slowly round the funnel of the crater to land on the beach at the head of the lake.
Kenji Tanaka got out and turned away, crouch-backed, from the swirl of the rotor blades. Then he straightened up, waved off the pilot and stood watching until the machine had cleared the crater rim and turned westward back to Tokyo.
He was tall for a Japanese. His hair was grey, but his skin was as smooth as old ivory and he carried himself like an athlete: supple, sparing of gesture but poised always to move swiftly. He was dressed in a business suit and overcoat, both tailored in London. His fur hat was a gift from colleagues in Moscow. He carried neither luggage nor briefcase. Whatever he needed was here, waiting for him in the old house hidden among the trees, in the small temple shrine where his father’s ashes were honoured.
There were servants to attend him day and night but no one came to greet him. Even I, his waiting guest, did not approach him. In this place he required that the rituals of his comings and goings should remain private to himself. So, I watched him through the moon-window of the tea-house.
He squatted by the lake’s edge and, with great care, gathered a handful of flat pebbles, testing each one for size and weight. Then be began skimming them across the water, measuring the distances against an old mooring pile to which the gardener tethered his punt. However, the sequence of the throws was more important than the distance. First he skimmed eight pebbles, then uttered a small explosive, ‘Ya!’ Next he counted off nine, ‘Ku!’ And finally, three, ‘Sa!’ I knew what he was doing because sometimes on our walks we had played the game together.
The numbers were the most dreaded sequence in the old flower-card game called hanafuda, which the cardsharps used to play in the country inns to fleece the yokels. They added up to twenty and the final zero made it the worst possible score. He had learned the game here, as a small boy. He had learned also that when you threw away the same numbers you could distance yourself from bad luck. The numbers had other meanings, too; but these had been revealed later in his life and were not related to this primitive ritual of childhood.
He clapped his hands together, dusted off the sand, then turned away from the lake and began walking steadily down the avenue of maples-in-flame. I followed at a respectful distance, but he seemed – or chose to seem – unaware of my presence. A hundred paces brought him to a small pagoda set in a garden of white pebbles and black rocks. The pagoda was very old, built of hand-hewn pine, fastened with wooden dowels. Its roof was of green ceramic tiles, still bright after the lapse of centuries.
Outside the entrance, hung by leather straps in a teakwood frame, was a bronze gong, as tall as a man, with a wooden striker. Inside was a single image of the Lord Buddha, carved in wood in the Amida style and painted with antique gold. Flanking the image were two small alcoves where the ashes of his father and his grandfather were kept, with their funerary histories recorded on hanging scrolls.
He made obeisance to the Buddha and to the ancestors. He lit incense sticks and planted them in the sand-pot. Then he closed his eyes and stood very still, reliving the experience that Hiroshi Teraro, the scholar monk, had taught him in his boyhood: ‘Close yourself in silence. Stand still as an ancient rock. Let the river of life flow round you and over you.’
I had known him long enough to understand that this bare, timeworn place was the fountainhead of the life-current of Kenji Tanaka, whom even his closest colleagues called the Stone Man. He had come here when he was ten years old, in the days of the Great Defeat, just after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His father was in hiding, threatened with assassination by the militarists because of his pleas to cabinet and to the Emperor to end the hopeless struggle. To protect his wife he had divorced her and sent her back to her family. Then he had fled with his son to this secret valley, last relic of an old family fiefdom.
He had placed the child in the care of the country family who managed the small estate and under the tutelage of Hiroshi Teraro, who had been a soldier and was now a poet, a calligraphier and adept in the disciplines of Zen.
It was in this shrine that all three of them had sat to listen to the Emperor’s speech of surrender. For the first and last time he had seen his father weep. Then he had heard the words that drummed in his skull-case for half a century: We were fools and cowards, gulled by criminals. We wallowed in cruelty and called it the honour of warriors. We locked ourselves in a madhouse and threw away the key. So, we became the first victims of the atomic plague which now threatens all mankind. At last we have been given a chance – a small one but, yes, a chance! – to build a new Japan, even perhaps a new world. But this time we dare not fail…You, my son, will have your part to play, but you must make yourself ready for it. For a while you will stay here and study with your master. Then you will go abroad, to Europe, to England, to the United States. You will learn the languages and the skills of other peoples. Afterwards you will come back here and take the place I will have prepared for you and for which you will have prepared yourself.’
As his father had prophesied, so it had come to pass. Today, Kenji Tanaka was President of the Tanaka Group, a giant conglomeration of banks, insurance companies, trading corporations and manufacturing enterprises, with interests in every country on the planet. He was Chairman of the small élite consortium who controlled the economic policies of the nation. He had just been appointed personal counsellor to the Emperor. He was rich beyond his dreams. He had risen as high as any man might aspire. But he was still a debtor, to his father, to his ancestors, to the whole complex of the society in which he moved. This was giri, the silken cord that would hold him in bondage until the day he died. It was giri that drew him back always to this childhood refuge to share the triumph with his father, even though he knew there was nothing to share but silence, no one to share it with but phantoms – and me who, being a gaijin, an outside man, did not count.
The incense sticks continued to smoke as he bowed himself out of the shrine. He put on his shoes, then stood by the gong, drumming on it lightly with his fingertips, feeling the old metal stir into a barely audible resonance. He lifted the wooden striker. He had told me how heavy it had seemed to him as a child, how Hiroshi Teraro always admonished him: ‘You do not beat the gong. You strike it just hard enough to set the particles moving within the metal and make their own harmonies. When we sit down tonight with the brushes and ink I will show you how to draw the music so that what you see on the paper will make echoes in your ears…’
So now, measuring and timing the strokes as carefully as if the old master were watching him, he struck the gong once, twice, and again. The sound rolled in waves through the woodland, rose and echoed round the bowl of the crater. In the old house they would have heard the gong and already they would be making ready to greet him with the ceremonies due to a homecoming master.
Kenji Tanaka smiled, set the striker back in its rest and walked out of the stone garden, back to the path. He showed no surprise when I stepped out of the shadows of the shrubbery, fell into step beside him and walked, in silence, friend with friend, the last fifty paces to the house.
In the house among the autumn trees, Kenji Tanaka and I were received, with feudal respect, by the guardians of the hidden domain. There was a small tribe of them: the estate steward, the farmer, the farmer’s wife, their two sons with their wives and children, the gardener, the cook, the housemaids, and Miko, whom he called his country wife, although she was neither a wife nor, properly speaking, a mistress, because she came or stayed by her own choice, at his request sometimes, but never at his comm
and.
The farm people, usually closed and resentful of strangers, accepted her without question as the chatelaine. The young girls adored her like an elder and more beautiful sister, who came always with exciting presents and left to tearful farewells. She was coming up to forty now, but the years had left few marks on her. She lived in an aura of extraordinary calm, beyond the reach of rage or malice. Tanaka’s relationship with her was the most satisfying of his life. Here in the tribal enclave she seemed the embodiment of all the traditional virtues of Japanese woman; outside she was a pilot who guided him wordlessly through the shoals and tide races of an alien ocean. As she steered him calmly through the homecoming ceremonies, I remembered what he had told me of their first encounter in Los Angeles.
In the early seventies, when the Tanaka Group was making its first big investments in the United States, he learned that a young Nisei woman was offering a range of expensive but very efficient services to visiting Japanese businessmen. The services were advertised in a brochure, designed by a famous wood-block artist, produced in Tokyo and circulated only to high-ranking executives of major corporations. That was the first surprise: her knowledge of the intricate structures of Japanese business. The second was that she was offering commercial services: bilingual secretaries, interpreters, temporary office accommodation, limousine hire, travel arrangements, lists of attorneys and accountants familiar with Japanese business. In addition, she offered conference facilities and small scale entertainment, luncheons and dinners, at her house, a discreet mansion in Holmby Hills.
Kenji Tanaka was impressed by the brochure, but sceptical of the promises. His education had made him mistrustful of American exaggeration. Also, he knew the habits of Japanese businessmen at home and abroad and he could not believe that sexual services were excluded from the menu. So he inquired of old Okawa at Sumitomo who, he knew, was as randy as a billygoat and always eager for contacts in a new city. Much to his surprise, Okawa offered high recommendation.