King of the Badgers

(There was one afternoon with the Sicilian baroque. The argument had sent his two women in opposite directions: Hettie back to the hotel and Miranda off with her guide-folder. He was on the steps of some big building, a palace or a cathedral or a museum, or something. Above him, the yellow crumbling cliff of fantasy, curling and uprising and flowering into stone bouquets and flying winged sandstone children; about him, the marble-paved square shining in the afternoon sun as if half an inch of still water covered it. Nobody was about. It was over ninety degrees, perhaps more. Kenyon, in his Englishman’s shorts and his Englishman’s sandals, sat in the sun surrounded by treasures of the Sicilian baroque. He took a long drink of the cold bottle of water he had just bought, and closed his eyes against the heat and the silence. It was some long minutes before thought returned: thoughts of home, and money, and work, and budgets. Those long minutes were probably the place he wanted to go.)

‘I know you didn’t enjoy yesterday all that much,’ Miranda said in Kyoto, after they had left their hotel and its rush-mats and paper sliding walls and endless proffered slippers. They had got through their third morning’s trying breakfast of miso, cold fried mackerel, pickles, rice and a swampy dish of green tofu disintegrating into cold salty water.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Kenyon said.

‘Well, there’s a few things I want to see, and I can get round them much quicker if we just agree to meet back at the ryokan at four.’

Kenyon did not object to this prepared speech. Something like it was often produced at roughly this point in their holidays. He had enjoyed the previous day, in fact. He had liked the empty yards of gravel with a rock or two in them that passed for a garden in this part of the world. He quite enjoyed looking at a stretch of moss on a boulder, and he liked the way the floors in the temples creaked, rocking back and forth on one to make it sing. He liked the restful way that the four temples they had visited had been much the same, only varying in their size and in the number of visitors there. It all seemed very nice, and not in need of the explanations that Miranda had been offering him from time to time, about Zen contemplation, representations of the Great Tortoise swimming across the void, or any such thing.

She got into a taxi and, smiling brightly, waved him off. Kenyon rebelliously put his folder of explanations into his shoulder bag, and started walking. Fairly soon, he came across a busy shopping street, of no historical interest, full of department stores and electronics shops. They had driven across it in a series of taxis a dozen or so times by now, and the area had called for no comment. He stopped at a street corner, and waited as if for the light to change. It did change, and Kenyon still stood there, enjoying the foreignness of the beeping and the foreignness of the movement. He liked looking at well-dressed people, and this crowd was uniformly well dressed. They seemed to have put on clothes according to their age and station, and not questioned the basis of their wardrobe any further.

Kenyon watched the crowds crossing the shopping street several times. After ten minutes, he went into a department store, and walked around looking at perfectly ordinary objects: saucepans, plates, clothes hangers. When he came across something he did not think existed in his country—men’s fans, kimonos, displays of sweets made of bean paste, pink jelly and chestnut—he walked on austerely.

Later, he came to a quarter of the town where trees hung over a clear roadside river, and men in tight athletic costumes sat by rickshaws and waited for tourists. Their shoes were rubber socks, cleaving between the big toe and the others, as if that were something they needed to grasp and grip with. He went on, and found himself in a street of wood-fronted houses, two miniature storeys high. This was picturesque, and yet there were no other tourists. They had been everywhere yesterday, snapping at anything.

Soon Kenyon began to feel hungry. He had tried to eat the breakfast but had largely failed. He decided that when it reached twelve o’clock he would go into a restaurant and order lunch. He did not know when lunch was eaten here, but they would surely make allowances for an English tourist, and some English people did eat their lunch at twelve. Twelve came, and he came to a restaurant. Through a bamboo gate, he could see a small garden, twelve feet by four, with a miniature bridge, a pond with carp in it, a bamboo trickling device and some arrangements of moss. There was no priced menu on the front, and suddenly he wondered whether this was a restaurant at all. He had heard fantastic stories about visitors to Hanmouth, after all, opening the gate to a private garden, sitting down at a garden table and ordering tea and scones. He went on.

There was a little run of restaurants further on, and every one had three shelves of plastic models of food in the window. They shone glossily, falsely and inedibly; no one could want to eat anything that looked like that. One of Kenyon’s rules was that restaurants that displayed their food in the window, whether raw, cooked, or artificial, catered for people who could not read. He did not want to eat with people who could not read. He went on. It was only a few minutes later that Kenyon realized that, after all, he could not read here either. The plastic dishes were aimed squarely at him.

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