The Custom House by Francis King

First published: 1961

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: Kyoto, Japan

Principal Characters:

• William Knox, the narrator, who comments upon postwar Japanese life with wit and irony
• The Reverend M. C. Welling, an Australian missionary brought low by allegations of sexual impropriety and murder
• Setsuko, the sole love in William Knox’s life and the only Japanese person he appreciates
• Asai, an impoverished student anarchist who vows vengeance against the foreign mission and materialistic Japanese
• Furomoto, a selfish, rich Japanese businessman and artist who has an affair with the young stripper, Sanae
• Sanae, an intelligent girl who hates her career as a stripper in a Kyoto nightclub and wants better things from life
• Aileen Colethorpe, a third-rate American artist hoping to make enough money to leave Japan and who rooms with Sanae
• The Reverend Mr. Ambleside, another missionary

The Novel

The title The Custom House is taken from a sermon delivered toward the story’s end by missionary M. C. Welling and refers to a heavenly custom house wherein the content of departed souls’ earthly existence is assessed. This assessment is an excruciatingly penetrating one: No secrets are allowed by the heavenly customs official and no covering up of past sins is possible. All who enter the custom house receive the judgment they deserve.

Certainly, the title accurately describes the careful examination of lives undertaken by the narrator, William Knox, during his stay in Kyoto, Japan, in the period immediately following World War II. To Knox, Kyoto, like other Japanese cities in this era, is highly Americanized, so much so that old beliefs tied to emperor worship—for centuries the glue holding together the Japanese—have been scrapped for a materialistic outlook scarcely tempered by the introduction of Christianity.

Despite the fact that Knox attempts to keep his distance from missionaries such as the Amblesides, M. C. Welling, and other Westerners, he is inexorably drawn into their lives and affairs. Through the lovely Setsuko, a neighbor of Knox who studied at an American college, Knox has the opportunity to talk openly about both the missionaries’ deficiencies and those of the Japanese.

Setsuko intrigues Knox, for she agrees with him that modern Japan is cursed by the mindless, pervasive conformity of her people; by their cruelty toward anyone who will not conform; by Japan’s self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, which has led to an often stultifyingly provincial outlook; and by her lack of moral direction or foundation. Knox, astonished by Setsuko’s insight into Japan’s shortcomings, finds himself in love with her. To a forty-four-year-old widower such as Knox, her fine intellect and beautiful features are overpowering. Yet, at story’s end, he discovers that she was typically Japanese in her duplicity, for word comes to him that she has fled Japan after having been found to have been a Soviet spy.

Central to The Custom House is the tragedy of the naive missionary, Welling, who teaches English to a group of Japanese young people by means of Bible studies. From the outset, Francis King makes it clear that Welling is a man of limited intelligence and abilities and has little understanding of the alien society by which he is surrounded. His students are passive and uninteresting; they seldom take any interest in what they are learning. One day, however, a student named Asai dares to tell Welling what no one else in the class ever would: that the only reason they come is to learn English, not the Bible. After this revelation, Welling questions not only himself and the meaning of his life but also the meaning of the Christian mission in Japan.

Subsequently, the only thing that interests Welling is his young student Sanae, a girl whose overt sensuality nearly overpowers his religious scruples. Sanae slowly reciprocates Welling’s love, while at the same time she becomes involved with the cynical businessman Furomoto, a married man who uses her for purely sexual purposes. Furomoto’s greed and selfishness are antithetical to Welling’s spirituality.

It is Furomoto, King’s representative modern Japanese man, whom the reader comes to suspect of engendering the novel’s central tragedy. Welling, having taken Sanae for a drive in his car into the rugged terrain near Kyoto, finds that he must confess his love for her, at the same time telling her that he cannot abandon his ailing wife for her. Sanae, reacting violently to his rejection of her, runs from the car into the deep woods toward a series of trash dumps near the river.

The next day, Sanae’s body is found on a mound of refuse, and the police, who have been informed that Welling took her for a drive, accuse him of murder by strangulation. Through Knox, however, the reader realizes that it must have been Furomoto who killed her, although allegations to this effect are never made.

Welling, his missionary career ruined and his church disgraced, is faced with an unhappy choice: either to go to prison for the rest of his life or to flee the country and go home to Australia but, by so doing, cast doubts upon his innocence. Painfully, he chooses the latter course of action.

Although the rising action leading to Welling’s escape from Japan is of primary importance, there is also another tragedy that occurs just before the one involving Sanae and Welling: the death of Asai. Asai, like Sanae, is victimized by the claustrophobic limitations placed upon poor Japanese. Bright and inventive and a natural leader, Asai would flourish in a society allowing upward economic mobility. In Japan’s restrictive culture, however, Asai has nowhere to go with his talents. Instead of passively accepting his plight, Asai attends Welling’s Bible classes in the hope of bettering himself.

Yet by speaking out in the classroom and shocking Welling, Asai succeeds only in establishing himself as a pariah within both the mission and his own society. Stung by his inability to break out of his condition, Asai vows retribution. Using his inventive ability for evil purposes, Asai bombs the car of Furomoto in the hope of killing him. The powerful suitcase bomb used in the attack does not kill Furomoto, but only his assistant and bodyguard; it kills Asai as well. This bombing may have spurred Furomoto to kill Sanae, although no one in the novel comes to this conclusion.

The Characters

Knowing much because he sees more than the surface of things, William Knox tries his best to make sense of the people he encounters in Kyoto. What little is known about him is that he is an agnostic who regrets his agnosticism and even envies the missionaries’ faith, a widower in his early forties who yearns for someone to love, a highly cultured man with a sound understanding of geopolitical events, of history, and, perhaps most important, of basic psychology.

Frankly puzzled by the missionaries and their wives and by his Japanese neighbors, Knox learns much about them by simply listening to them talk about one another. His caustic wit and ironic sensitivity to the absurd enable him to deal with the claustrophobia, decay, and death he finds in Kyoto.

Knox’s antithesis, M. C. Welling, is a lost soul, a religious man of kindly instincts made desperately unhappy by the absence of his sustaining wife, by the stark failure of his mission to largely pagan Japan, and by the temptations offered by young Sanae, his Japanese student who wears tight blouses. Caught between his religious beliefs and his need for someone he can love both sexually and spiritually, Welling makes the mistake of being in the wrong place (a lonely country road) with the wrong person (Sanae) at the wrong time (just prior to her murder by strangulation). Not bright enough to understand how he could be accused of murder, he turns to William Knox for help. Knox advises him to flee Japan and he does, losing, in the process, his self-esteem and the esteem of his peers.

On the other hand, Asai, Welling’s Japanese student, never compromises his beliefs. He is always true to his inner beliefs, even, as it turns out, if it means dying for them. His single-mindedness, though, is brutal and unfeeling, thoroughly based upon self-love rather than any love for others. For the most part, like other characters in The Custom House, Asai is mainly a cardboard cutout character, one-dimensional and therefore unknowable.

Like Asai, Furomoto is one-dimensional, a villain whose life is entirely dedicated to selfish pursuits. He has all the coldness and furious intensity of the stereotypical Japanese businessman without any distinguishing traits which would make him memorable. His one-dimensionality is in large part the result of the author’s conception of Japanese as shallow conformists.

Setsuko avoids being one-dimensional chiefly because she is a combination of East and West. Western in many of her attitudes, Setsuko is in an excellent position to judge not only the foreigners whom she encounters in Kyoto but also her fellow countrymen. To her neighbor and lover William Knox’s surprise, Setsuko is not typically Japanese, for she has her own opinions about her native country, many of which are out of sync with the thinking of most Japanese. She finds them shallow, overly quick to change ancient ways of doing things, mindlessly conformist, cruel, and without much in the way of moral grounding. She admires Knox and, in a highly secretive fashion, loves him as well. Without her, Knox would have no sounding board for his ideas about Japan, nor would he have an intellectual Japanese confidante to help pass the time. She surprises him again and again, but no more so than at the novel’s conclusion, when he discovers that she may have been a Russian spy.

Sanae is the only other important female character in The Custom House. Her principal role in the novel is to tempt and inadvertently ruin M. C. Welling, her teacher at the mission school. Sanae is typically Japanese in her stoicism and acceptance of her station. Yet she becomes different from other poor Japanese girls when she falls in love with Welling and seeks, with his help, a way out of her life as a dancing girl in a sordid club. Unlike the more spirited and intelligent Setsuko, however, Sanae remains a victim to the end of the story, never finding a way out of her situation. She is victimized both by Furomoto, who simply uses her for sexual purposes, then gets rid of her (perhaps to the extent of killing her), and by the voyeuristic Welling, who cannot leave his wife to marry her.

Critical Context

Francis King’s trademarks of cool detachment from his characters, his fascination with death and decay, and his penchant for irony find their most notable expression in The Custom House, a novel written midway in his productive career.

An elegant, careful writer, King painstakingly constructs a well-plotted indictment of postwar Japan as well as of those who would alter Japan’s traditional way of life. Yet he remains far removed from the problems in which his characters find themselves embroiled. William Knox is an exception to the rule, for he, like the author, relishes irony and distance from others. As King’s mouthpiece, Knox judges the other characters much as the celestial customs agent is said to judge souls.

At times serious and at times wildly comic, King is one of a handful of Western writers to deal adequately with postwar Japan. Although his portrait is dark and unflattering, it is one of the best depictions of Japan from a Western perspective.

Bibliography

Kelly, James. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XLVI (June 3, 1962), p. 26.

Naipaul, V. S. Review in New Statesman. LXII (September 22, 1961), p. 394.

Raven, Simon. Review in The Spectator. September 22, 1961, p. 398.

Stucki, C. W. Review in Library Journal. LXXXVII (June 15, 1962), p. 2399.