A Writer's World (14 page)

Kyoto is also
par
excellence
the home of the geishas, where those talented performers (part artists, part courtesans) are trained to an apogee of perfection, to perform their elaborate dances deliciously in many a lacquered salon, and bring contentment to many a paunchy protector. Half close your eyes one evening among the narrow streets of the geisha quarter, and you might almost be back in feudal Kyoto, before the razzle-dazzle West arrived. The lanes are gay with tea-houses and restaurants, dainty screens masking their entrances, soft slippers paraded invitingly at their doors. Hundreds of globular lanterns light the district, bathing it in orange radiance, and high above your head there floats an advertiser’s balloon, flaunting illuminated letters on its tail. Now and then between the houses you may glimpse the Kamo River, wide and gurgling, with a glitter of lights and gaiety on the opposite bank, and the dim moonlit hump of the hills beyond. Two or three young men go rolling noisily pleasure-bound; and suddenly there emerges from some unexpected alley a vision of the legendary Japan – a geisha in all her plastered glory, moving fast and purposeful towards an assignation. Immensely tall is her mound of hair, jet black and shiny; her face is vivid with white and scarlet; her costume is gorgeous with silks, sashes, the gaudiest of clashing colours and the floridest of patterns; and as she hastens awkwardly down the street, embellished from head to foot with paint and brocade, she seems less like a living woman than some fabulous toy, some last masterpiece by Fabergé, enamelled like a queenly trinket, animated by the ultimate refinements of clockwork.

For Kyoto is still a capital, despite the rebuffs of history: within these old walls, behind these dainty shutters, up these temple stairs, hidden in these perfumed gardens, along these green river boulevards, in the silence of these tea-houses and honoured libraries, high on the mountains or lost among the moss, infused into the very texture of Kyoto is the essence, the fragrance, the pith of Japan.

All this is true, and it is the continuity of Kyoto life that gives this place its sense of power. No less real, though, are those corroded aspects of modern Kyoto that affront the foreign visitor like a juke box in an abbey; and it is the harsh juxtaposition of the near-sublime and the almost unbearable that gives the city its sting, and its bitter after-taste.

Kyoto does not leave every visitor soothed or elevated: there is something disturbing to its quality, some hint of the morbid or the unhealthy. In some ways it is a dead city, rotting among its mementoes, but in others it is, like the rest of Japan, pulsing and proliferating with hybrid life, part ordered familiar past, part groping present. It is not serene, no longer Heian-kyo, the City of Peace. Hardly anywhere in Kyoto is ever empty, except the cloistered family gardens or the remoter forest glades. Down every street the citizenry pulses with a babel of horns and a gallimaufry of styles, from the immaculate
obi
to the jeans and sweaters of rip-roaring adolescence. Through every brooding temple the Japanese tourists noisily pour – schoolchildren by the multitude, festooned in satchels and luncheon bags, honeymooners ceaselessly photographing each other, businessmen gravely bowing one another out of the sight-seeing bus. At every holy portal the souvenir-sellers raucously greet you, brandishing their postcards or dangling their toy birds, and the mendicant ex-soldiers, in parade-ground travesty, salute you with a hook hand or stand their wooden legs to attention. The trains, those unavoidable essentials of the Japanese scene, rumble through the night beside the river, and the taxis career maniacally among the rattling trams. Sometimes you may see a bride in kimono, but just as often you will see her in a hired Paris copy, with her bridegroom pin-striped and wing-collared, and her father displaying the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who is going to charge it all on his expense account. They play baseball in the shadow of Kyoto’s shrines. They practise athletics around the wall of the Imperial Palace. In Kyoto today you can never be quite sure whether some picturesque bauble is an object of Shinto veneration or an advertising notion. It is a two-faced city: one head a phoenix, one a jackdaw.

Is it a ferocious city, too? Do there linger yet, among these symbols and sanctities, some old savageries of the Japanese spirit? Does a sword glint sometimes, up on the hill? Perhaps. Kyoto, for all its enclaves of perfection, feels a troubled place. Even the most fulsome of tourists may sometimes sense, as they pass from temple calm to highway frenzy, some buried malaise in the flavour of this great city. Kyoto is the soul of Japan, a microcosm of the inner nation. You may taste all the fascination of this astonishing country as you wander among Kyoto’s marvels – the Sparrow Chamber or the Wild Geese Chamber, the Silver Pavilion or the Hall of a Thousand Mats, the paintings of the Thirty-Six Famous Poets, the Veranda of the Archery Contest, the immortal garden of Ryuanji: but you may feel obscurely ill at ease in the Hall of the Imperial
Visits, and all too likely the blare of a loudspeaker or the vicious hooting of a taxi horn will drown the sound resembling the song of a Japanese bush warbler.

More people live in Hong Kong than in all the rest of the world put together, and they make more noise than a million electric drills, and they work like automation, and their babies are beyond computation, and their machinery chitter-chatters away for twenty-five hours every day, and in their markets they sell every fish that was ever caught, and every shrimp that ever wriggled, and every crab that ever pinched, and their excellent shirts cost fourpence-ha’penny apiece, and there are five million Chinese for every European in the city, each one of them more energetic than a power station: and all these unbelievable paradoxes of prolixity and profusion are a lesson in the impermanence of power and the mutability of history.

Just over a hundred years ago the British seized Hong Kong from an addled China, and were conceded sovereignty over it ‘in perpetuity’. The island was almost uninhabited, but they made of it a tremendous port and a gunboat station supreme, where British merchants could command the China trade beneath the guns of the Royal Navy. Hong Kong became one of the greatest of free ports and entrepôts, and a brilliant symbol of European superiority. Here the techniques of the Western world were applied to the corrupt and ramshackle structure of China. The merchant princes lived in splendour on the eminence of the Peak, while across the hills in China the impotent Asians squabbled and cheated each other and carved the ivory ornaments that would one day look so pretty upon the mantelpiece in Epsom.

Today the British are still in Hong Kong, and the rich merchants roll down from the Peak each morning in their big black ponderous limousines. The great banks and merchant houses are still magnificently bustling, the company flags fly bravely beside the Union Jack. But you cannot spend a day in Hong Kong without realizing that it lives by the courtesy, and at the mercy, of the new China. Times have changed with an imperial vengeance. The
long grey warships that still lie in the harbour (successors to
Aphis
and
Mantis
and the elegant old river gunboats) no longer fool anybody, least of all the hard-headed British. Hong Kong is indefensible, militarily and economically, and it lives half on trust and half on cynicism.

Consider its geographical situation. If you stand on a high place on Hong Kong Island you can see virtually the whole of the Colony. Below you is Hong Kong itself, for ever England, and beyond it is the glorious sweep of the harbour, crammed with the steamers and junks and ferryboats and launches of free enterprise, never silent, never motionless, one of the great mercantile waterways of the world. But in the middle distance are the mountains of China proper, and most of the land in between – the New Territories, the essential hinterland of Hong Kong – does not belong to Britain, but is only held on a lease that expires towards the end of this century (if international leases have any meaning by then). Not only is China ominously close. In its own back yard British Hong Kong has only the precarious rights of tenancy.

Or move, for another view, to an economic vantage point. At West Point on Hong Kong Island there is a wharf where the junks arrive from Pearl River and Canton, in communist China. It makes no bones about its affiliations. In the tumble-down eating-house, where the labourers stoically consume their rice and villainous fish, a huge poster proclaims the industrial potential of communist China, and the tugboat outside carries on its superstructure a series of slogans about people’s rights and imperialist aggression and that kind of thing. Somewhere in an attic above your head a lonely but determined flautist plays a communist propaganda melody, and the ducks that are offloaded in their thousands from the rickety junks, crammed in huge wicker baskets and carried by relays of cheerful and courteous coolies – even the ducks are brain-washed Khaki Campbells. Without this traffic from China, without its ducks and hens and vegetables, Hong Kong probably could not long survive. The communists know that when the lease of that hinterland expires in 1997, Hong Kong will be theirs for the plucking: but they also know that if need be they could squeeze it into submission long before then. All the cards are theirs. They can take the place by force, if they are willing to risk a world war. They can starve it out. Or they can simply wait for another few decades, a mere flicker of time among the Chinese centuries.

The British are not doing badly in Hong Kong, and are performing some good for the world, too, but the moral of this colony’s situation is a daunting one. The communist Chinese tolerate its independence partly
because they have bigger things to think about, and partly because they don’t want to arouse new issues needlessly; partly because they need bargaining counters, and partly because they themselves find the economic services of Hong Kong useful. The capitalists of Hong Kong thrive because they do not believe the communists will move before 1998, at the earliest, thus leaving them time to make a quick new fortune or embellish an old one. The simple people get what benefit they can from good government and economic opportunity, and try not to think about the future.

But above all these several attitudes, the place is haunted by a sense of the hugeness and fertility and brute strength of Asia. Not so long ago a writer could observe that England had cut a notch in China as a woodsman cuts a tree – ‘to mark it for felling at a convenient opportunity’. In Hong Kong today, with six hundred million Chinese over there across the hills, and with the whole place a tumult of Asian energy and noise, and constantly threatened by Asian power, and riddled with Asian ideologies – here in Hong Kong you cannot help wondering how ambitious a woodsman China will be when it reaches the summit of its power, and how many of us old elms it is going to notch for firewood.

In the central market of Hong Kong the edible frogs are tied together in bundles while they are still alive, a string of straw binding them around their stomachs. They thus present a multi-limbed symmetrical appearance, and one pair of little legs is constantly jumping to the left, and another pair kicking out to the right, in a very erratic and unpredictable conflict of impulses. This, though clearly uncomfortable for the poor frogs, is not altogether unfunny to watch: and when I saw it for the first time, my goodness, said I to myself, how are we to compete with this extraordinary people, when even their frogs have twelve legs apiece, and lunge about with such comic and irresistible vigour?

At 45°14’N, 12°18’E, the navigator, sailing up the Adriatic coast of Italy, discovers an opening in the long low line of the shore: and turning westward, with the race of the tide, he enters a lagoon. Instantly the boisterous sting of the sea is lost. The water around him is shallow but opaque, the atmosphere curiously translucent, the colours pallid, and over the whole wide bowl of mudbank and water there hangs a suggestion of melancholy. It is like an albino lagoon.

It is encircled with illusory reflections, like mirages in the desert – wavering trees and blurred hillocks, ships without hulls, imaginary marshes: and among these hallucinations the water reclines in a kind of trance. Along the eastern reef strings of straggling fishing villages lie empty and unkempt. Away in the wastes there stand the sails of fishing boats, orange, yellow and magenta, with cabalistic signs or heraldic symbols, a rampant red horse, an all-seeing eye. The shallows are littered with intricate shambling palisades of sticks and basket-work, and among them solitary men, knee-deep in sludge and water, prod in the mud for shellfish. A motor boat chugs by with a stench of fish or oil. A woman on the shore shouts to a friend, and her voice eddies away strangely, muffled and distorted across the flats.

Silent islands lie all about, lapped in marsh and mudbank. Here is a glowering octagonal fort, here a gaunt abandoned lighthouse. A mesh of nets patterns the walls of a fishermen’s islet, and a restless covey of boats nuzzles its water-gate. From the ramparts of an island barracks a listless soldier with his cap over his eyes waves half-heartedly out of his sentry-box. Two savage dogs bark and rage from a broken villa. There is a flicker of lizards on a wall. Sometimes a country smell steals across the water, of
cows or hay or fertilizer: and sometimes there flutters in the wake of the boat, not an albatross, but a butterfly.

Presently this desolate place quickens, and smart white villas appear upon the reef. The hump of a great hotel protrudes above the trees, gay parasols ornament a café. A trim passenger steamer flurries southwards, loaded deep. A fishing flotilla streams workmanlike towards the open sea. To the west, beneath a smudge of mountains, there is a thin silver gleam of oil drums, and a suggestion of smoke. A yellow barge, piled high with pop bottles, springs from a landing-stage like a cheerful dove from an ark. A white yacht sidles indolently by. Three small boys have grounded their boat on a sand-bank, and are throwing slobbery mud at each other. There is a flash of oxyacetylene from a dark shed, and a barge stands on stilts outside a boatyard. A hooter sounds; a bell booms nobly; a big white seabird settles heavily upon a post; and thus the navigator, rounding a promontory, sees before him a city.

It is very old, and very grand, and bent-backed. Its towers survey the lagoon in crotchety splendour, some leaning one way, some another. Its skyline is elaborate with campaniles, domes, pinnacles, cranes, riggings, television aerials, crenellations, eccentric chimneys and a big red grain elevator. There are glimpses of flags and fretted rooftops, marble pillars, cavernous canals. An incessant bustle of boats passes before the quays of the place; a great white liner slips towards its port; a multitude of tottering palaces, brooding and monstrous, presses towards its waterfront like so many invalid aristocrats jostling for fresh air. It is a gnarled but gorgeous city: and as the boat approaches through the last church-crowned islands, and a jet fighter screams splendidly out of the sun, so the whole scene seems to shimmer – with pinkness, with age, with self-satisfaction, with sadness, with delight.

The navigator stows away his charts and puts on a gay straw hat: for he has reached that paragon among landfalls, Venice.