Excerpt from The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Yes."

"His grandfather . . ." Peony began, but Wang broke in and stopped her, not wanting the man to know who they were, where they came from, afraid perhaps also that he might say something disparaging about an artist so far his superior.

"Yes," he said, "a very good teacher."

"I could see that," the man said, "but you ought to have more than one teacher and I will be your other."

He put down his cup, took a clean sheet of his coarse paper, held it up for a moment by its top corners, as if to demonstrate its virginity, and dropped it on the floor. Wang started forward to pick it up, afraid that the stained floor would spoil it, but the man waved him back.

"Let it lie, dear boy!"

He refilled his cup and drank it off again, then walked unsteadily round the room, staring maniacally all the time at the paper in the middle of the floor. Returning to his starting-point, he put down the winecup and mixed ink with a great deal of water in a larger cup.

"Stand clear!" he shouted, and the two children edged back towards the balcony.

Suddenly he rushed forward and tipped half the contents of his cup on to the paper. The ink made a pool at the centre with splodges all round and spatters as far as the edge and on to the floor itself.

"Ah, ah, good, very good!" he crowed, his smile even broader than before, his woeful teeth even more evident.

Then, shaking the sandals off his huge feet, he stepped straight into the middle of the ink and began to scuff it about with his toes. Stepping off the paper, he glanced quickly at the result, then circled round it, half bent over, and poured more doses from his cup with a circling motion of the arm, prodding and pulling at the wet ink with one or other of his big toes. It was a kind of dance, rhythmic, barbaric. Then, still in a tremendous hurry, he returned his empty ink cup to the table, seized a brush and, using the handle, manipulated the drying ink into smaller streaks and whorls, crouching close to the paper and darting all round it, looking even more like an ape. Finally he straightened up, went back to his table, poured and swallowed more wine, laid down the brush and suddenly sat on the floor, perhaps deliberately or perhaps because his legs had ceased to function.

"Pause for thought," he said, looking at Wang and Peony amiably, as they still stood astonished in the doorway. "Sometimes, you know, I even piss on it. But not today. Not in front of the lady." He enunciated the words slowly and carefully and then became quite silent for a minute or two, his body relaxed, his eyes closed, dozing or meditating.

"Nowlesseewhatwegot!" The words all ran into each other as he staggered to his feet and approached the paper like a comedian in a play faced with something that might jump or bite.

"Ahahaha! Yeshyesh!"

He made large beckoning gestures, bowing and staggering as his bows and gestures caught him off balance. The children moved warily forward together, not holding hands, which would have seemed somehow undignified. Were they afraid of his ridicule or his disapproval? He was half child, half elder and they had no experience of how to respond to the irreconcilable mixture. They walked carefully round the paper, not knowing what to say. It looked a complete mess—no viewpoint much different from another—unreadable. And then suddenly Wang saw that it was like the pool below, at the point where the waterfall drove through the surface, spitting up spray, making a deep wound with wrinkled edges in the smooth skin of the pool, the buried energy forcing its way up again here and there in further disturbances round the centre.

"It's the pool," he whispered to Peony. "Don't you see?"

She shook her head. Without any depiction of the cause of the disturbance, the falling water, she couldn't decipher the effects.

Excerpted from The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling. Copyright © 2014 by John Spurling. Excerpted by permission of Overlook. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.