'During winter,' Lao-tzu said, 'one should not ejaculate at all.' The venerable philosopher, reputed to be a hundred-and-eighty years old, had already surpassed becoming an Immortal. Ten partners in the hour before midnight. Almost twelve hundred copulations without emission so far this year (c. 499 BC). With each, an aphorism had come to mind.

But it had not been a good year, though the reclusive author of the Tao Te Ching had prodigiously staved off rumours that he was dying. He was banking on the hope that his aphorisms would restore him from those previous pronouncements on health which had been stale and technical. An example:

To build up yang essence, one must have sexual relations with many different women as often as possible without emission. Reinforced by the female yin ... the longer one can do this, the more yin essence will be absorbed, thereby increasing and strengthening one's vitality ... man's yang essence will flow upwards along his spinal column, delivering an awesome power to his brain and to his entire system. This will render him immortal. Time will then be suspended and exorcised. Et cetera.

These were not the words of a divinity. They weren't even the words of an aphorist.

But suddenly Lao-tzu was inspired. He had begun producing aphorisms for a secret book. One came with each young woman. He put it down to the Tiger Potion he was taking. It was recommended to him by his friend Doctor Lü Ta-ching, who was so insatiable after it that his wife took out an injunction, complaining that his attentions had devastated her.

This potion had given Lao-tzu the ability to perfect the art of intercourse. His hearing and vision became acute. His circulation improved. His loins were like those of a tiger. His skin became glossy.

But on this night, at number 1,199, the famous philosopher was stuck. No aphorism came to him. Not even a crude one on rain and earth, semen and secretion.

What was worse, he had committed 1,198 aphorisms to memory. Unable to think of the next, he was also unable to recall the others.

He tried the Reverse Flying Duck position. No go. He assumed the Two Dancing Female Phoenix Birds posture. Nothing. The Dark Cicada Cleaving to a Tree. Emptiness. The Donkeys in the Third Moon of Spring. Not a word came to him. He looked at the young woman. He hadn?t really observed his partners before. It was a revelation. She was extremely beautiful. Her pale flesh and dark eyes delighted him. He tried the Fluttering Butterflies. She smiled indifferently. It was really more of a blankness. No philosophy at all. To think that he once had to breathe in the manner of the Tao, gnash his teeth, apply pressure to secret parts to hold back from the abyss of excess. He disengaged himself. Went outside into the next room.

On his table, the future magnum opus. The introduction was already written. For the first time he experienced a fear of not being able to go on. A terrifying vision of somebody else completing his work appeared before him: a ghost-writer, a supplementer stealing the sacred kernels of his words, the hard-won visions of his longevity. Some bastard making the most of hindsight.

When he returned she was still there, sleeping composedly on her silks. He tried again. The Winding Dragon. The Pawing Horse. Nothing. Not a pithy thing. The Hounds of the Ninth Day of Autumn. Disaster. Becoming quite ill and feverish, he suddenly sat up and held her face in his hands.

She looked at him steadily and then said very softly: ‘I am the book you intend to write, the intention of which is jade resplendent. But writing is not jade.’

Upon hearing these words, Lao-tzu, who some said had been seventy years in the womb, entered her, experienced brevity, and died the first of many deaths. Two months later, after conceiving the ultimate aphorism ... one that was so brief it was completely silent, but which could neither be expressed by silence ... Lao-tzu stopped eating and grew small. He found himself sailing into a cloudy, grey and humid world, his body losing distinction, his mind unwilling to grasp the shapes of things. For a brief moment he felt buoyant, almost mythical, and then was dead forever, from what modern physicians now surmise as cancer of the prostate.

Two

But then, you can see that he is wearing a Panama hat and is standing on the roof of a luxury hotel, gazing at the Pacific Ocean, performing some sort of Tai Chi. Looks like a praying mantis, what’s more.

Here, on the eastern seaboard of Australia, he finds it difficult, this process of reflection. Sweat beads on his brow. The tall pines whisper in the mid-winter silence. Those few people who are about avoid each other, walking singly or in pairs, keeping a distance between words. The sand is like wind-blown dust.

He watches the waves breaking again and again on the sand below. Impotent, erupting in froth at the end of a long and once-powerful swell before the mouth of the bay, they barely disrupt a wading child. Kick. Retract. The Golden Cockerel Standing on One Leg – something aboriginal in that. The awesome regularity and attrition of the waves speak to him of emptiness, maybe of death. But there?s laughter there too. Across the bay, a lighthouse. A regularity there too, in the night. In its sign, the study of death, perhaps an imaginary sadness waiting for the moment of deliverance which never comes, longing for a romance which is empty of substance. Bend. Grasp the Sparrow?s Tail.

Yesterday, for instance, standing on this roof at the height of a fierce gale, he remained unmoved. He thought of the drama and the indulgence of describing that brief storm and noticed a kind of indifference. He was exhausted by events. He thought of the sea, which was neither green nor grey, holding its black centre, like a huge swimming eye. Then something he would have previously described as immaculate burst upon him just as sunrays began to fan the black sea and a pair of dolphins broke the surface at distant intervals, catching him each time by surprise. It occurred in a moment without hope or expectation. Startled, he felt as if the scene had been put together for him alone.

He leans slightly over the railing, draws his arms back slowly and feels a dizziness which will not allow him to determine the point where he is leaning out too far or keeping well within himself. On the edge, a woman once told him with an ironic smile. Flicking his hands. Turning to Sweep the Lotus. Only after several months, when he thought he knew her and had recounted his life briefly to her, had he recovered his balance. He thinks: the figure of the woman at her window. Not as the observed but as the observer.

My heart breaks out from the inside and pounds, a grotesque organ of blood and muscle, sucking at the glass.

This he says out loud, in his scissoring Shanghainese. He sneezes. Hears wings. A gull beats twice to gain a current and turns an orange beak and a topaz eye towards him.

He tracks the seagull to the bookshop beneath the hotel. Every morning, for the last week, he has gone in to see if her books were there. He has bought everything she has written. Her collections of stories filled his shelves. One day he followed a stranger down the street, offering her money for the book she had in her hand. She looked startled at first. Then a loitering smile on her face. Without a word, the woman put the book into her handbag. Mad. All mad, these foreigners.

At breakfast in the plush dining room he reads her biographical data and studies her photos. The waitress approached and departed, her smile, as she did her rounds, snapping on and off like an old semaphore in a dusty railway yard. The photographs were taken a few years before publication. There have been no more books, so it says on the back flap.

'Nobody has rights, only needs and purposes. I write books and you build buildings. But what you really want to do is to meditate on these things. The end of meditation is not to do anything at all.'

There she goes, her social voice. She hated his invention of privileges, shouting at him once on a wind-swept lookout at midnight with the sea treacherous below and Japanese tourists attacking the hill, the headland erupting in chromatic flashes.

You hate life because you don't understand timeliness. Her voice rose over the sea thumping against the cliff and he heard the bell in the bay mournful and regular and saw the glimmer of freighters fighting the swell to gain the horizon and their lights sinking forever. It was true. The past and the present confused him. If you wait, things will take shape.

He felt old. He didn't want anything to happen, he was going to say. If only he could conquer time.

In the sparkling morning truant youths go spearfishing in wetsuits. Under the turquoise water their flanks gleam. A slurry of sand. Later, blood rubies on the fish they discard.

Upstairs in his room he closes the glass doors to the balcony. Already his memory is waning. He tries to think of a counterpoint to her timely observation. He can think only of an empty sound. A whispering: Birth. Death. The waitress's smile.

In and out. I cruise up the street and there's a jazz band playing in a beer garden. Trad. I don't like trad. I like hard bop that goes on for six hundred bars. Same old crowd. I have on a sharkskin suit and a Panama hat. Nobody looks at me. I'm cool here. I don't stand out. Anywhere else outside the city they used to stare. I used to think I was exotic. Now I know I'm only foreign and middle-aged. A pouch of grass gets passed around. They call me Uncle ... Uncle Ho. That gives you an indication of their generation, as if you couldn?t tell. I'm part of them, but then again, I'm not. 'Hey you!' they call, making me smile. I tip my hat. In this new land I'm me and not me. In and out. Ease and unease. I adjust the crease in my trousers. Regret not having learned the saxophone.

He didn't seem to have any weight. Indeed the heaviness in his chest was the only thing that prevented him from falling, reminded him of gravity. He appeared on rooftops, floating, so it seemed to those who worked in the hotel. A few times they shouted at him, thinking he was a prowler. He stepped lightly across the glass panels in his dark suit, a bat, glowing softly. 'Hey you!' they shouted, and turned on the arc lights. Yes, that was his name. You. You Bok Mun. Broadly speaking, his name meant he was well read. Narrowly speaking, he was just You. Everyman. Or sometimes, just Old China. Touch him for luck. People here gave him an arboreal relation: Yew. He had them planted alongside the hotel. Conifers with elastic wood to withstand the wind. But because of the trees blocking and funnelling up the wind at a tangent, the revolving door refused to turn in a clockwise fashion. The Spirits were trapped in a pocket of dead air. That was bad luck in anyone?s language. For a Chinaman, it was disaster. 'Hey you!' His solitude interrupted. The loneliness of the long-distance migrant.

Three

The luxury hotel sits on the site of a former rubbish tip. Fishermen used to gather near the festering stink edging the sea where the fish were plentiful and the sun would take a long time to sink while the whiting darted and the flathead scoured and the terns guzzled and choked on offal and old fishermen drank rum between sunset and dawn. Then in the morning they stacked gutted fish in sugarbags and drove home over the dunes, through the scrub, to fibro cottages and weatherbeaten wives.

'This was once a paradise,' the writer told him, though she would never have been fishing with her father. Girls were not patient enough, or driven enough. One never knew about the landscapes of the past, the continuous transformation of seashores, layered evocations. A figure, attenuated in the distance, swept a metal detector over the sand. She said to him once: Expecting to discover the past is a sort of paradox, isn't it?

On the headland, turreted apartments, stern-high like Portuguese caravelles. Down by the fishing co-op, lateen nets. She said that one day everything would be gone, her childhood, her growth, even the discovery of the point at which memory mingled with the future, everything becoming oblique and borrowed.

But was there ever a pure origin? he asks himself as he turns back to the sea. His eyes rest on the tops of the pines. A kind of levelling, these pines waving effortlessly at this height. The luxury hotel with unexpected corners and small alcoves. A new view of the sea each time, as the sea changes too, squeezing off emotions. Alcoves leading into bedrooms.

His eyes follow the line of cars parked along the boulevard. A different kind of local population from that which existed before, she had told him. Fishermen driving sports cars. Opposite the hotel two small boys climb on a fallen bin. One crawls inside and the other tries to right it. He topples over. The first boy comes out, holding the speared fish of the morning. In the shimmering distance the figure with the metal-detector appears to bend, marking out in the haze a thin line between memory and invention.

It is not the uncovering of things, he is thinking, but the way things uncover him.

If they think I’m this mysterious architect who comes up the coast every year for a couple of months, a Chinaman, inscrutable, withdrawn, they’re wrong. If only they knew what went on in my head. Hieronymus Bosch. Bodies. Fornication. Sodomy. Sex manuals. Blow-up dolls. Madness. Paint. The West and its freedoms. A terrible screaming.

In Hunter Street in mid-city Sydney they’d see these doodles in a corner of my design. Luckily, in the office nobody looks. They spread, sometimes, into the drafts. Naked women in the ceilings. Whole brothels and lunatic asylums between the floors. Then a kind of tiredness or metal fatigue.

I scan the drawings and run them through the computer. The building doesn?t hold up. I switch from isometric to oblique, get inside it, check out the nuts and bolts in greater dimension. The screen tells me the stress is too much, the load unbearable. I punch in a few more figures. There?s the problem. I find an ecstatic couple caught in flagrante delicto where the central pillar is supposed to be. Human flesh is weak. Back to the drawing board.

All this makes it hard for me to speak in socially acceptable ways. All I can think of is anarchy What can you expect after almost a decade of cultural revolution?

I asked her out the second time I saw her. I just went up to her and short-circuited small talk.

I didn't know any other way. It's the language. I'm terribly shy otherwise, stammering and stuttering in the wake of a coup de foudre. She had sort of red, tousled hair, pale skin and wore frayed jeans. I'd seen her body-surfing. I suspected her name was Sarah-Anne or Bobbie-Jane or one of those hyphenated names from the western suburbs where they built mock-Dallas houses on flat, ten-acre blocks alongside dusty roads, the women working as part-time masseuses, driving turbo-chargers at 120 km/h, shotguns in the back and money in their skimpy bras. They had a thing about going to the beach, but were particularly susceptible to cancer.

But she was smiling. She knew my ways. I’d already told her the Chinese from China dispensed with finesse. There was too much to catch up on. She told me it wasn’t too late to learn.

We had dinner in the hotel restaurant and she told me she was a writer, and of course I thought, an aspiring one. Whatever the case, I knew it was a mistake. You didn't call yourself a writer until middle age, and she looked about twenty. Besides, I didn't want a complicated relationship. Check-out chicks were about my level. I'd given Chinese ways away. Smart talking. That was a formula I knew that succeeded.

'Does it shock you that I'm a writer?' she asked, eyes grey-green, in which I could drown, but saw my bald head reflected instead.

'If you dig a deep hole you will find me there ... on the other side of the world.'

Now she frowned. She had no time for mystification, I could see that. Maybe she just had no time, and this was a challenge for me. I liked dragging things out. The French have a nice word for it: draguer. To be on the prowl. To tell stories. To seduce.

If you have enjoyed reading this extract and would like to purchase a copy of After China, please download the order form available from the following link and post to Lythrum Press.

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Critical Praise for Brian Castro’s After China

After China is almost breathless with excitement at times – and the speed with which this novel proceeds and ends is part of his wish, in this particular book, to pare down, to work against what he calls his ‘natural inclination’ for ‘wave-like sentences’.

... the book's swift climax involves some daring on the part of the writer ... He admits becoming involved towards the end with a kind of grand symbol of 'Rabelaisian renewal and fertilisation'.

The writing enacts the interplay between two versions of imagination and desire, the narrator intruding as a kind of courtesan both voyeuristically and proprietorially to arouse and entertain the reader.

... the book is inventive and makes many spectacular gestures, grafting Australian vernaculars onto Taoist humour, delighting in the play of contrast between cultures, human fortunes, history and sex, preferring balance to resolution.

Perhaps in the end, After China's rejection of romanticism is inconclusive, even elegiac, its structures dominated by incompleteness, but reading it is a satisfying experience.

For a book which takes loneliness and death for its themes, After China has unexpected reserves of warmth, affection and humour. Insisting on the erotic, it is surprisingly delicate, restrained and chaste. And for a work of such diverse and eclectic reference it is rewardingly resonant and interconnected. The whole novel is thus a brilliant feat of balance.

After China is perhaps Castro's most immediately accessible and engaging work so far.

The book is cleverly written, though it may take some time to get into the swing of it. I found it heavy going at the outset, because the expected connections were absent. Upon reflection, it comes together in provoking ways, as an argument about the way we construct narrative.

... a supple and tantalising stream-of-consciousness narrative, which [Castro] employs to register unbidden memories, contingent surprises. He delivers less than a love story, less than a stylised comparison of two cultures and instead offers a retrospect on confounded hopes.

After China constructs a man [You Bok Mun] aware of all the emotions he has denied. Instead of adopting the familiar 'Asian' device of Australian novelists of introducing a mentor figure to give sententious, maddening instruction to uncouth Antipodeans, Castro has found a remarkable voice for an Asian expatriate in Australia.

In a novel that ought to irritate with its obliquity, ought to be open to charges of pretension, Castro has managed a noteworthy meditation in rootlessness.

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Critical Praise for Brian Castro’s After China