This, in its outlandish way, is a unique memoir. At once naive, tough, stark and sentimental, Tao recounts an eight-month rite of passage in which the reader sees, through its author’s still-innocent eyes, a Japanese art student entering an adolescent dream of love on the road.

While travelling through China in the summer of 1988, when the country was cautiously opening up to foreigners, Aya Goda arrived in the Silk Road town of Kashgar in Xinjiang province. There she met and fell in love with Cao Yong, a maverick Chinese artist. For a while all goes well for their affair, but badly for this book. Goda is stricken by Yong’s half-savage charisma. There are embarrassing pages on art and love. “[His] paintings vibrate with outpourings of feeling, depicting the cries of a soul unmasked. . . I find it difficult to look at them square on; if I don’t keep myself steady, I feel I might lose my balance and fall over”.

But she doesn’t fall over. The day after they meet, he proposes to her and she slaps him. Then she sticks by him after he puts on a risky exhibition of his paintings in Beijing. He escapes arrest only by fleeing back to Lhasa, where he has worked as a teacher, and he takes her with him. Thereafter, for seven months, the couple are on the run, evading the police, bribing officials, gathering documents for eventual escape to Japan.

At first they elope along the Sichuan-Tibet highway, a roller-coaster mountain road where Yong had once smuggled cloth and peacock feathers between Tibet and the lowlands. Even after they reach Guangzhou (old Canton), this paperchase continues, as they crisscross China in the hunt for a tortuous array of permits and visas. Three times they return to Tibet. Goda becomes pregnant, and has an abortion in a provincial hospital (an abortion in China is one thing easily come by). They get stoned on marijuana. They live in a mud and concrete room with 11 dogs.

Food becomes an obsessive leitmotif of the book. Periods of hunger are followed by feasts of fist-sized dumplings or roasted Sichuanese rabbit heads (the brains taste like cheese). Once, Yong is saved by self-made mouse soup. They take whole days off to eat. To the end, while the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou takes its time authorising their permits, they survive on almost nothing, cheated by money-changers, before they fly out at last into the sanitised world of Japan (where, predictably, their marriage fails).

Long before the end, of course, the reader is interpreting their story bifocally. Their series of journeys reads in part like a glorified hippie adventure. The narrative is filled with adulation for the genius of Yong’s art. Conversations are reproduced novelistically, from memory; but it is irresistible to wonder whether the kitsch statements placed in Yong’s mouth are echoed in his painting. Certainly, the speed with which tourists buy up his sketches sounds ominous.

The value of Tao lies with other things. Like Ma Jian’s Red Dust, which likewise describes the fugitive journey of an artist-dissident, it vividly conveys the routine brutality and corruption of rural China and the weak grip of the central government over its distant regions. Its harsh evocation of provincial Chinese life ranges from a bald account of smuggling (oiled by bribery) to the dilemma of Chinese immigrants in the Tibet of the 1980s.

Yong’s remembered youth, interpolated like long flashbacks into the text, provides some of the most arresting episodes. His family, with millions of others, suffered exile to the countryside during the cultural revolution. They nearly perished. Later, in 1983, he was assigned to Tibet as an art teacher, but earned a reputation as a tough and a rebel. Once, he slipped over the border into Nepal and teamed up with a destitute American hippie to sell his paintings to tourists. He is nothing if not resourceful. One of the book’s more lurid chapters recounts his friendship with a sky-burial master outside Lhasa, where he assisted in the dismemberment of corpses. In its most repugnant incident, he drinks from the skull of a newly dismembered girl, with whose body he had become infatuated. No wonder his first wife was unfaithful.

But the book’s most remarkable passage, perhaps, describes his journey to the remote ruins of the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge. They lie some 700 miles from Lhasa. He reached them alone, on horseback, and found the ground littered with broken spears, armour, halberds and decomposed bodies left over from battles around the city in the 17th century. Then he settled in one of the cave shrines to reproduce the surviving Guge murals – paintings rich in Indian and Persian influence, infused with the native Bon religion.

All in all, this is not a book to love, but it will take its place among the bitter annals of China’s changing face. Goda now lives in her native Hokkaido, and generously describes how Yong’s art has taken him away from her (he is “a bird of passage, soaring beyond borders”) to, of course, America.

TAO: On the Road and on the Run in Outlaw China by Aya Goda, translated by Alison Watts
Portobello £16.99 pp396
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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