The Wish House and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

shelling. The Chinaman ought not to count.”
    It is astonishing to me that anyone could read this straight, especially when the professor immediately visits deflation on the callow Kipling (p. 306): “Why on earth can’t you look at the lions and enjoy yourself, and leave politics to the men who pretend to understand ’em?” And later Kipling underlines the criticism of his globe-trotter side (p. 311): “The Professor says that I have completely spoiled the foregoing account by what he calls ‘intemperate libels on a hardworking nation.’”
    It is this persona who, in Japan, comes in for frequent strictures from his professor traveling companion: “If you think you can understand Japan from watching it at a railway station you are much mistaken.” And this is Kipling’s rueful, implicit opinion also.
    Underneath the comic globe-trotterese, there is a recognition that the Chinese are
workers
, unquelled by the climate. They are a force to be reckoned with. And they know it: “They stand high above the crowd and they swagger, unconsciously parting the crowd before them
as an Englishman parts the crowd in a native city.
There was something in their faces which I could not understand, though it was familiar enough” (my italics). The adopted globe-trotter persona may not know more than “I do not like Chinamen,” but Kipling is aware they are rivals, they are sahibs, as my italics show. He isn’t a simpleton. He’s a subtle and extraordinarily intelligent ironist.
T HE J APANESE
    By the time Kipling has reached Nagasaki, his globe-trotter’s assumed confident racial superiority is succumbing to a sense of plurality(p. 322): “It’s due to the extraordinary fact that we are not the only people in the world. I began to realise it at Hong Kong. It’s getting plainer now. I shouldn’t be surprised if we turned out to be ordinary human beings, after all.” So much for the English master race.
    It is quite clear that, in
From Sea to Sea
, Kipling adores the Japanese—for their natural artistry, for their demonstrative love of children, and for their physical smallness. He was a small man himself—but larger than the Japanese. “Japan is a soothing place for a small man. Nobody comes to tower over him, and he looks down upon all the women, as is right and proper.”
    Most of all, though, Kipling admires the Japanese for their Otherness (vol. 1, p. 319): “Then I fell to admiring…the surpassing ‘otherness’ of everything around me.” The one thing he deplores is their attempts to ape European civilization, which he regards as misguided and faintly comic. For instance (vol. 1, p. 447): “It’s enough to make you weep to watch this misdirected effort—this wallowing in unloveliness for the sake of recognition at the hands of men who paint their ceilings white, their grates black, their mantelpieces French grey, and their carriages yellow and red…. And in the face of all these things the country wants to progress towards civilisation!” And here Kipling adds an ironic, exasperated exclamation mark to evaluate the worth of that “civilisation.” (See also vol. 1, p. 335.)
    There are even two expressions of Kipling’s racial inferiority to the Japanese. The first is (vol. 1, p. 376): “Japan is a great people. Her masons play with stone, her carpenters with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, death, and all the eyes can take in. Mercifully she has been denied the last touch of firmness in her character which would enable her to play with the whole round world. We possess that—We, the nation of the glass flower-shade, the pink worsted mat, the red and green china puppy dog, and the poisonous Brussels carpet. It is our compensation….” You’d have to be unrelentingly obtuse to take that quotation as triumphalist imperialism.
    Now the second example (vol. 1, p. 320): “What I wanted to say was, ‘Look here, you person. You’re much too clean and refined for this life here