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Sport 39: 2011
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My guide to the megalopolis was distinguished Occidentalist Keith Kurosawa. We met by arrangement in a coffee shop. He had the trim, salt-and-peppery distinction of the liberal professor.
His work had lately taken an unorthodox turn—in pursuit, he explained, of a travellers’ tale, a rumour inscribed like a fossilised footprint concealed in the dust of forgotten spice routes.
Paranoid bowels of the Vatican Library: the fractured stem of an opium pipe; a carboniferous accretion unknown to modern pharmacy.
Thus a trail had opened, at the end of which hung a sinister fruit of the Datura family, the notorious ‘crazy eggplant’ of jingly Cathay.
A drug, then? (One had hoped for more.)
Well, yes, but not just any drug. For the substance that had made its way with the caskets and camel-bags of those earliest adventurers was credited, Kurosawa told me, with unveiling the mysteries of perpetual vigour.
‘Absurd, no doubt?’ Amusement played at the crinkly corners of his level gaze. ‘But I see I have piqued your interest, my inquiring friend.’
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