The Tent of Orange Mist

During the Sino-Japanese conflict before WWII, Japanese soldiers kidnapped thousands of young women, putting them to work as sex slaves for their officers. Paul West tells the story of Scald Ibis, an intellectual 16-year-old held captive in her own home in Nanking. Scald Ibis becomes the favorite concubine of Hayashi, the colonel who runs the Tent of Orange Mist, as the bordello comes to be known. West's strong, finely wrought prose is at once tender in its texture and cruel in its lucidity; his characters are delineated vividly, with power and psychological depth. "The language thrilled and appalled him," the narrator says at one point. When West's pen traces appalling circumstances, the thrill is not mere sensationalism-it is sensation itself, technique and emotion joining forces to scale the reader's spine. This fictional glance at a neglected episode in history is a profoundly moral book, as well as a rare aesthetic pleasure.

The art of decadence, which reached its zenith in late nineteenth-century French literature consists in transforming artificiality and repugnance into the stuff of heady pleasure. In decadence, the whole must serve each, individual part. In this sense, decadence is just the opposite of classicism in which the opposite is true and each part must be pressed into service of the whole. The pleasures of decadence, however one wishes to view them, and, no matter how artificial they may be, can be extraordinarily exquisite. In The Tent of Orange Mist, Paul West shows that he is truly one of the masters of decadence.The Tent of Orange Mist is set against the backdrop of the horrors of the rape of Nanking by the Japanese army during the winter of 1937. The protagonist is Scald Ibis, the very proper adolescent daughter of a Chinese scholar. Two other characters dominate this book: Colonel Hayashi, the man who orchestrates Scald Ibis's transformation from child into woman; and Hong, her enfant terrible father who undergoes a none-too-pleasant transformation of his own. As Scald Ibis becomes involved in a sado-masochistic pas de deux with Hayashi, her home is turned into a brothel and she, herself, is transformed from a stunned sex slave into and elegant geisha. Against a grotesque backdrop of luridly depicted atrocities, Scald Ibis, Hayashi and Hong play out a game of intense tragedy that includes domination, subversion and mutilation.Hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians met a grisly death at the hands of the Japanese during the rape of Nanking. Most writers who have undertaken to portray this atrocity have combined stark realism with an epic narrative technique, hoping to engage the reader's attention and evoke a sense of righteous outrage. West, however, takes a very different approach.The Tent of Orange Mist is a book about the seductive power of art and the temptations of artifice. In keeping with the theme of his story, West imposes on his extraordinarily artificial characters an intimate and rather claustrophobic view that is perfect. In West's extremely talented hands, this improbable trio becomes believable, even when indulging in the most bizarre of circumstances. After being gang-raped by Hayashi and his troops, Scald Ibis's first gesture is to compose an elegant poem in calligraphy to the man she considers her new master.This is a story of rape, of rapture, of poetry and of atrocity, but West tells his tale in prose that is graceful and delicately ornate. Although this extremely intimate look at a world and characters who are often bizarre and tortured and perverted will be offensive to some readers, The Tent of Orange Mist is a book that, considering what it depicts, is exquisitely beautiful and elegantly wrought.

When I picked up this book in the library's new book section, a couple of years ago, I just grabbed it because the title grabbed me and it looked interesting. I'm so glad I got it! I was mesmorized by this story of a young chinese girl and what she had to endure when the Japanese invaded. What she had to watch as a Japanese officer tried to court favor with his superiors by turning this artist's home into a classy geisha house, even bringing in a high priced Geisha to train the young Chinese girls. I had no idea about this part of history and was horrified and what men will do (in the name of war?) and it made me think about women will do and, perhaps, what I might do if these circumstances were to befall me.

From 100,000 to 200,000 young women were raped during World War II as a sacrifice to the Japanese War Machine. Savagely ripped from their homes in China, Korea, and other parts of Asia, young girls were used as "comfort women" for the Japanese army. When they became pregnant, sick, or otherwise debilitated they were brutally murdered. The authenticity of their story told here, lesser known certainly than the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, cannot be doubted. Sued in Tokyo during the mid 1990's by survivors of these atrocities, the Japanese government attempted to expunge the record by making a multimillion dollar commitment for elevating social programs. The bid for pacification was fiercely rejected by the surviving victims and the entire event duly noted on CNN. Experienced and acclaimed author Paul West has chosen to explore this violent footnote in history through the story of Scald Ibis and her family. Mother and son, Ah and Shu, are early victims of the invasion leaving behind the daughter, Scald Ibis, who watches the enemy commandeer her home and turn it into a brothel. After much suffering she and her father, Hong, are reunited; how they chose to survive the lewd, destructive, and shattering Japanese juggernaut is the heart of Mr. West's story. Divisiveness is not the purpose of this book. Read it as a reminder that there is a difference between right and wrong; absolutes do exist. Read it to remember and reflect.