The Tent of Orange Mist

by Paul West

Discovering that her brother and mother have been brutally killed after the 1937 invasion of China, sixteen-year-old Scald Ibis, defiled by Japanese troops, is forced to work as a prostitute in order to support her ailing father

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, China, Novels, World War II, War

288 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Paul West (February 23, 1930) was an English-born novelist, literary historian and poet, the author of 24 novels, who lived in America since the early 1960s. He resided in upstate New York with his wife, the writer, poet and well-known naturalist Diane Ackerman, until his death in 2015. Paul, still remembered with affection by his old colleagues and friends in England as a big, jolly man, was born in Eckington, which is near (and now considered a part of) Sheffield in South Yorkshire, but was during West’s childhood a Derbyshire village associated with the famous literary Sitwells of Renishaw.
Paul was honoured with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1985), the Lannan Prize for Fiction (1993), the Grand Prix Halperine-Kaminsky Award (1993), and three Pushcart Prizes (1987, 1991, 2003). He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Literary Lion (1987), and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters 1996, France).
His parents, Alfred and Mildred, really cared for books, and created an environment which ensured that young Paul inherited a great passion for literature, which was enhanced when he went from his native village to study first at Oxford University in England and later at Columbia University in America. He never lived in England again after going to Columbia, and in later years Paul was involved with other US universities in teaching roles, notably Pennsylvania State University.
Paul West’s novels have included: ‘A Quality of Mercy’ (1961); ‘Tenement of Clay’ (1965); ‘Alley Jaggers’ (1966); ‘I'm Expecting to Live Quite Soon’ (1970); ‘Bela Lugosi's White Christmas’ (1972); ‘The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg’ (1980); ‘Rat Man of Paris’ (1986); ‘The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper’ (1991); and ‘OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday’ (2000).
His non-fiction has included the autobiographical ‘I, Said the Sparrow’, a delightful essay on his Eckington childhood; ‘The Growth of the Novel’ (1959), ‘The Modern Novel’ (in 2 vols, 1963); ‘Robert Penn Warren’ (1964); ‘Words for a Deaf Daughter’ (1969); ‘A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-discovery’ (1995); and the remarkable ‘The Shadow Factory’ (2008), the aphasic memoir he dictated with such struggle and resolve –it brings tears to the eyes and admiration to the heart, as we are reminded in reading it of the courage of this man. It is a ‘must-read’ in the context of the terrible stroke he suffered in 2003. Paul’s wife, Diane, also wrote about that stroke and its consequences in her book ‘One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage and the Language of Healing’. Paul’s poetry collections include ‘Poems’ (1952), ‘The Spellbound Horses’ (1960), and ‘The Snow Leopard’ (1964).


Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul West died on October 18, and it was an easy decision to read another of his novels, in his memory. This novel takes place during the Rape of Nanking in 1937, but it should not be read for the history. It should be read for the splendid things the author does with a bildungsroman about a young woman who, in the novel, never leaves her home. Her home leaves her.

As one watches how the protagonist's mind deals with her situation, one gets to enjoy the way West’s incredible mind works, as well. The prose is West’s usual: erudite, unexpected, and repetitive, with an excellent ear. The novel’s only weakness, for me, was the material about and by Sandro Somatti, a 16th-century Jesuit.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of the almost unfathomably great Paul West’s 1995 historical chamber piece THE TENT OF ORANGE MIST is first invoked directly as a name or possible name for its principal location in the penultimate paragraph of the seventh chapter, arriving as this does fairly late in the novel’s first third. This is Paul West, currently pretty much my favourite English-language prose stylist of the postwar era, if not of all time, so as ever it is tempting (and will remain ever tempting) to cite amply: “A gramophone record was spinning on the turntable, failed exhibit in perpetual motion, and Hayashi was making a snuffle-bubbling sound. This was the disarray of afterward, no longer the Altar of Heaven but the Tent of Orange Mist, Hayashi’s half-sentimental invention, deemed more sensual a title, less sacrilegious. Hong stared in horror, telling himself that venery came first, not tea or conversation. He did not even recognize his daughter. With an almost random pluck, he seized the Japanese flag and left.” This fecund tableau, a painting painted with a volley of words and precise rhythms, is constructed around the three principals of this three-handed drama, serving as the apex to the proper introduction of Hong—erstwhile academic, dandy, and calligraphy adept—who enters this picture as an interloper in his own home, now reimagined as an outlandish bordello (first called Altar of Heaven, then, this being the first we’ve heard of it, Tent of Orange Mist) under the malign governance of Colonel Hayashi—rapist, pillager, stamp collector. (Of Hayashi: “The epitome of the cultivated man, he became savage because of it: so fine-honed as to be a razor when he chose, yet so refined he knew refinement was always there to come home to. For so long restrained, he could now express himself fully.”) Scald Ibis, the daughter Hong fails to recognize in the mist of the irreal afterworld moment, has up until this point been the novel’s unambiguous point of identification. “Scald was the basic notion, Ibis the part you sang with a nasal lilt.” The tableau from late in the seventh chapter fractures perspective, or smashes it like bits of mirror, much as the history of a nation and of a family has been irreparably shattered, a sixteen-year-old girl unthinkably and unthinkingly despoiled. Scald Ibis has been repeatedly raped, “shanghaied into prostitution” (one of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand “comfort women” in bondage to the Japanese occupying forces), and forced to cultivate then progressively perfect a new protean identity as means to survival. “Reading poetry, she had marvelled as layers of inhibition fell away one by one until all that remained was her pulse, attuned to everything but sundered by it. Surely what happened to her today had not been an act of poetry; it had skinned her alive, an initiation raw and curt. All she was certain of was that what had happened was important.” The violence of the marauding invaders is not only comparatively unthinking, its expresses its own expressive incapacity, “as if ramming home an inferior point.” The novel commences in typically bravura Paul West fashion, the set and setting in its broadest sense announced with verve. The opening paragraph: “Warlords, unless they have sunk very low, do not sing anthems, aubades, or odes of dithering farewell. On December 12, 1937, Tang, the warlord in charge of Nanking, fled the city, and Japanese troops poured in, raping and looting. No child, no woman, was safe. The remaining Nationalist troops withdrew up the River Yangtze westward, toward Wuhan, while Scald Ibis found herself being questioned by weary, sedate men of discernible cultivation. She nonetheless retained enough of her wits to be astounded when she heard Japanese speaking Chinese almost as if they belonged here, too, and had lived here in spirit all along.” Many readers will doubtlessly find themselves quite adequately situated, as the barbaric infamy of the rape of Nanking (in popular parlance) is of considerable notoriety, as was the Japanese imperial mania of the first half of the 20th century, informed by a proprietary eugenicist fanaticism and covered by euphemistic proclamations concerning a “Co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia.” What this first and most ultimately means for Scald Ibis: “The objective, she decided, was to lay her waste until she was no good for anything; the more defiled and dishevelled she appeared, the more they pestered her, inflamed by her mess. Swarms of bees would alight on her corpse, and she would soon become a source of honey given back to nature, far from useless.” A few chapters later: “Murderous planet that we live on, she thought; we keep needing to prove how Godlike we can be. Japan didn’t really want to possess China. It wanted to do some killing, and now China wanted to do the same. Men could not forgive one another for being alive, she thought; each victim yearned to contemplate a landscape full of corpses; each corpse is in the ideal condition for history. What, she wondered, was the exact pleasure of carving into something that was working remarkably well?” If the Japanese authorities, cosigning the worst conceivable wholesale transgressions of common good from their underlings, think of themselves as “godlike” in the phallic sense of a consecrated, impregnable mono-divinity, the protean Scald Ibis—adaptable, lithe, artful—is the pantheistic honey that spreads and that no samurai sword can meaningfully castrate. Scald Ibis is the true daughter of her father Hong, he a reader of Shakespeare, Stendhal, et al., personal friend to the Chinese-American movie star Anna May Wong. Hong is closer in spirit to his daughter, but his trajectory here is marked fatefully by his positioning within a human triangle that points to a way of reading war and history from the standpoint of men, the daughters of men, and other men, usually on the prowl or presumed to be so. The genetic blueprint for this thematic architecture insinuates itself at the beginning of West’s novel in the form of an epigraph from Proust’s WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE concerning how in the winter of life “one comes to like only the very youngest girls, those in whom the flesh, like a precious leaven, is still at work.” The young body that is at work, glistening and mercurially aglow with that work, is, in West’s imaginative worldings, already at work with the stuff of death, excrescence, decay, swampy absorption, honey for the bees….and all the more beautiful, profound, soft, and vulnerable for it. Poetry itself is the work of life in death and death in life, the reeling of a consciousness found in confounding apprehension of its embodied, filled-to-the-brim finitude. The body of Scald Ibis is put to work in the sense that she is put to work as a prostitute, adapting efficiently on account of uncommon intelligence and survivor's force of will. This is not the context that propels her father to seal his mortal fate in an act that embodies vengeance’s longing “to contemplate a landscape full of corpses,” the aesthete and dignified moral being losing out to the historically conditioned subject, the “father of Nanking” a role that effectively kidnaps him. Hong can in fact appreciate his daughter’s cunning, her wrangling favour with Hayashi, becoming his prized possession (if only in the Colonel’s own estimation), garnering herself a layer of protection, graduating from rape victim to prostitute and then to aspirant geisha under the tutelage of imported trainers Aki and Fuyu. Hong performs an analogous feint, inveigling himself into the inner circle after having spent some time living incognito in the third floor fire place, first transitioning into house boy, then official Hayashi-approved translator, and finally aspirant auxiliary officer in full Japanese regalia, all of it performed under false pretence, father and daughter now “two protean survivors mimicking the behavior of mutual strangers.” It is not the mere whoring that seals our trio’s fate, but rather a ritualistic rite of coprophagia, or, strictly speaking, martial kink involving the oddly dainty consumption of the sixteen-year-old girl’s excrement, a bit of business practically straight out of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s SALÒ, only coded with a good deal more polyvalent élan. Shit as the work of the young girl’s body…as the work of living death within the fleshly, a primordial putrescence immemorial, is the straw that will break this camel’s back. The excrement of Scald Ibis is the return of the repressed in a general sense, but also in as more specific one, in that it doubles the bobbing severed head of Shu, the firstborn son—Hong’s son, Scald Ibis’s brother—ineffectively concealed in the erstwhile family villa’s well, revealed there to father and sister only belatedly. Hong’s suicidal vengeance is in large part the metastasis of this trauma too, as though it were coming out sideways, the hurt too great to assimilate at the site of its excitation, the wound only incurred indirectly, circuitously. Scald Ibis sees the predations and decadent perversions of her captors with a comparative sobriety, first coming to apprehend her new role in terms of “the venereal imperative” that is the fundamental law of the perpetuation of any sexually-reproducing species, and then coming to realize that Hayashi and his fellow officers “are not butchers but researchers infatuated with spectacular ends.” The Gods of death become eaters of shit, bees to a privileged honey bereft of nourishment, gobblers of a death that is theirs as much as it is anybody’s. This is the third Paul West historical novel I have read which features a variation on the axiom “you’ll eat a peck of muck before you die.” (See also THE WOMEN OF WHITECHAPEL AND JACK THE RIPPER (1991) and A FIFTH OF NOVEMBER (2001).) Passing through this rite, there can be no question of life resuming as it once had, just as the family domicile becomes the Tent of Orange Mist and ultimately no longer even that, the mist having all but evaporated. Hong reflects (or West reflects through him): “Nanking was worse than a ghost city; it was a cipher, warm in memory, but no longer an address.” The Tent of Orange Mist is a metonym for this vanished Nanking. While the novel named for that transformed and vanished home is, as has been established repeatedly, an intimate tale featuring three principals, the absent mother and son are already ghost presences, a kind of mute chorus, phantomic agencies. We know they are dead before Hong or Scald Ibis do, casually butchered along with innumerable others in the early days of the siege of Nanking. The only material manifestation of either party will come in the form of the horror of that severed (practically Elizabethan) head and its discovery. Early in the novel there is passing mention of Ah, Scald Ibis’s “mother, the Confucianist,” and we will later have access to Hong's heartsick reminiscences concerning the couple’s early, eminently concupiscent courtship. One of the most beautiful passages in the book—this from an author who packs his books with so many superlative sentences and paragraphs that the mind of the reader can tend to sputter in ecstatic overload—comes rather late, offering a profound and supremely elegant elegy to Ah. “Hear it for the Ahs, then, whose slowcoach metamorphosis from 1937 to 1938 deserves fanatic witness. We will not offer that here, but, out of honor to the principle of the novel’s underground, we will report her onflow from time to time since she was loved, mated, made quick with child once, twice, and only then ruined beyond all prose’s power to recover those longed for. She makes all the noise of a clipped toenail dropped into a wastepaper basket, but she will not fall out of sight, she will not, she will remain what she has been made. Hong will recall her forever, a man doomed to be enclosed in memory as the Chinese are by their language, and not by that Wall.” The beautiful, profound, and characteristically Westian final sentence establishes with precision the nature of Hong’s tragedy, dispossessed occupier of a home no longer his, prisoner to a wounded memory and the symbological-epistemic context that makes intelligible his “spectacular end” (which is also pitiable and pitiful, in the manner of all unavailing actions undertaken by the helpless). Here we might find a first negotiable road into the most unusual conceit in THE TENT OF ORANGE MIST, this involving the projected life, imaginatively fielded of and through Scald Ibis, of Sandro Somatti, S. J., “a wry, astute Jesuit born in 1574,” something of a missionary (known as “Visitor to the East”) and first introduced in the thirteenth chapter. Increasingly, what we hear from Somatti are reports on the dire condition of his foreskin, which is in the process of tightening to the point that he is living through something of an escalating medical emergency for which he resorts only to increasingly desperate prayer and ineffectual, quite painful self-administered repetitive-obsessive procedures. It is, to say the least, a declaratively odd element insofar as concerns the novel that incorporates it. The thing is: Somatti is aware and makes it known that he is aware of the Jewish practice of circumcision, which would clearly be the appropriate clinical avenue here, but he, the zealous Jesuitical mouthpiece, would rather end his days suffering the worsening condition than participate in so heathen a practice as would the Jews advocate. In this sense, Somatti is, like Hong, stricken as historical subject precisely on account of his being “doomed to be enclosed” in his context and conditioning. In the novel’s final chapter, Scald Ibis, from the standpoint of the 1980s—her hands “small” and eyes “truculent,” but a wizened woman who still “tackled each day like an imagination newborn”—reflects upon Confucius, and perhaps, without its being stated outright, her Confucian mother: “To Confucius, son and penis were one and the same, the same word: product and producer fused.” And such is the case with Paul West, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, a man whose historical fictions give us the cursory details of context and event, but whose perfect anatomization of human details consistently surpasses what you would be likely to imagine imaginable. This is a colleague whom fellow master Alexander Theroux designates, in a blurb on the back of the Scribner TENT OF ORANGE MIST hardback, a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma.” If the Roman playwright Terence wrote of one for whom nothing human is alien, for West it is a matter of all that is human being keenly personal in a manner most profoundly intimate.

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Opens in 1937 with the start of the Japanese brutal take over of the city of Nanking which becomes known as the "Rape of Nanking." It illustrates the plight of intellectuals and artists during profound and violent social and cultural upheaval. The focus is 16 year old Scald Ibis, the somewhat isolated daughter of an eminent Chinese scholar who disappears as the city fall leaving his family to deal with the Japanese which leaves Scald Iris alone. She is unprepared for dealing the the terrible conditions because of her being raised in a privileged intellectual family. She is taken by a Japanese "warlord," Hayashi, so. in spite of being repeatedly violated by him and his officers, her condition "improves" when compared to other, Chinese females. She is forced to work as a prostitute in a bordello and changes slowly from a totally naive to the ways of the real world to a woman living surrounded by infamy. Her father's sudden reappearance with psychological and physical ills becomes a real challenge threatening both their lives.

[Melinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have this kind of obsession with Nanking and the events there during WWII, so this seemed like a good read.

Alas, not for me. The Tent of Orange Mist tells the story of Scald Ibis, a 16 year old girl who is kept by the Japanese as a "comfort woman". She lives in her own home which becomes a high class brothel. She has no idea what has happened to her brother and mother, who disappeared the day of the invasion. Her father, a former professor at the university, is a Chinese soldier at the front, who later deserts and returns home to find the brothel in his home. Together Scald Ibis and her father plot to keep him hidden and reorder things there.

We are introduced to the running of the brothel by the Japanese colonel, Hayashi, who makes Scald Ibis his special favourite. And at some point, Scald Ibis, who is well educated begins telling the tale of an Italian monk who was in the orient in the 1500s. Then we have interspersed chapters talking about the monk's genital diseases. Really? I suppose this is a metaphor or object lesson or something, but
I really didn't get it.

Scald Ibis survives and lives out her life to tell her story,but the book is so convoluted and bizarre that I really did not enjoy it.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise sounded very interesting and based on historical fact....plus, it was on the short list for the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize, but I found my interest wane. The setting is Nanking, China, 1937, shortly after the Japanese invasion. (Remember the rape of Nanking and the comfort women?) The story centers around Scald Ibis, a 16 year old Chinese girl, who is "saved" from the brutal deaths her mother and brother faced, as she was forced into being a prostitute/comfort woman. Hayashi, the Chinese military man who selected/saved her, built his "tent of orange mist" which serviced other military men. He ends up having a special relationship with her. The story is built around her surviving and adjusting between the Japanese and Chinese culture. It is complicated by the sudden appearance of her scholarly father who also adjusts in order to survive. But, many times the story was verbose and repetitive and I debated about even finishing it. I found myself skimming sections to get on with it.

[Laurie Tomchak · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading a non fiction book about the rape of Nanking and a fictional book that touched on it, I found this one. Very readable (I finished it in two days) but at times a bit creepy. It deals with the rape of Nanking as it affected two people's lives, a chinese woman who becomes a geisha
for the occupiersn and her father. The creepy part comes from the sexual politics--the author, who writes very well, seems to focus on certain sexual practices with a little too much interest, without clarifying their symbolism. Some characters are introduced and then fade away. The idea of focussing on one or two characters is a good one, but West doesn't use them to make us see the bigger picture, as I think he intends.

[Luisalex Delarosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The setting is in Nanking, China, 1937, shortly after the Japanese invasion.The story centers around Scald Ibis, a 16 year old Chinese girl, who is "saved" from the brutal deaths her mother and brother faced, as she was forced into being a prostitute/comfort woman. Hayashi, the Chinese military man who selected/saved her, built his "tent of orange mist" which serviced other military men. He ends up having a special relationship with her. The story is built around her surviving and adjusting between the Japanese and Chinese culture. It is complicated by the sudden appearance of her scholarly father who also adjusts in order to survive. But, many times the story was verbose and repetitive and I debated about even finishing it. I found myself skimming sections to get on with it.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West takes place during the Rape of Nanking. Personally, I thought the author digressed from the main plot too often to the point where I just skimmed the chapters about Somatti. If West had not dragged the plot out and added more about the Rape beyond what occurred in The Tent of Orange Mist, the book could have been great. However, he did not and and I gave the book one star.

[Ryan Tran · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is based on a story of a 16 year old girl by the name of Scald Ibis. This setting is 1937 when the Japenese invades China also known as the Nanking war. So far, the book hasnt made that great of an impression on me. The book jumps in different directions often. I felt that it was hard to focus on the main plot of the story which was Scald trying to regroup with her family members on the day of the invasion. I hope that im wrong and that the book does improve over time.

[Kevin Lin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly this book had a lot of potential. Great plot, excellent characters, related to a very controversial event in history. However, the author falls short on the story development. This book is very slow, and the writing style is not my personal favorite. However, West is very descriptive and knows how to drag scenes many many chapters. An OK book but not recommended.

[Diana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paul West's prose is breathtaking--so much so that you lose touch with the story he's telling. The prose is so thick that I couldn't see the characters and events well enough to identify. I enjoy West's turn of phrase, but it was too much of a good thing. Also...what was with the 16th C. monk and his ongoing problems with some STD?

[Louvaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written novel of the rape of Nanjing, as seen thru the eyes of a Japanese brothel-keeper and his "comfort girl". Juxtaposes the horror with well-chosen beautiful prose. Surely the Chinese/Japanese way?

[Kevin Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book on conflict between China and Japan and I was able to related this book to some parts of my family's history.

[Sheri · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel set during the Rape of Nanking, a subject already so powerfully addressed by Iris Chang in her nonfiction work, that I was left underwhelmed by this story.