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to change schools.
    â€œNo,” Mary Sensei explains. “Not Gonzo. Gonzo will do fine here. Just you. Without Gonzo.”
    This is a new concept, but not—oddly—an unpleasant one.
    â€œAnother karate school?”
    â€œNo. Another style. Maybe a soft form.”
    â€œWhat’s a soft form?”
    She tells me.
    The upshot is a tour of the local schools of soft-form pugilism, and the first thing which becomes apparent is that the term “soft” is misleading because it is relative, the comparison being with men and women so desperate to turn themselves into machines of empty-handed demolition that they have spent hours and days and months striking wooden boards and sandpapered target dummies to condition their fists, and who consider an hour ill-spent if they have not driven one foot through a pile of bricks. It is not a question of whether the style is
violent,
but of whether that violence is direct and forceful or subtle and convoluted. To the eye of a novice, soft forms appear delicate, baroque and artistic, while the hard forms are brutish and merciless. The truth is that the soft forms are more considered in their application of pain and damage to the body. Which is more unpleasant to the object of their attentions is an open question—and which variety attracts more dangerous lunatics in the suburban setting is also unclear. I rapidly reject the smiling, flinty
aikidoka,
whose expressionless perfection informs the opponent that his life or death is irrelevant, and whose motions include a sword-cut twist at the end to provide the coup de grâce. Their modern, street-fighting cousins of European and Brazilian ju-jitsu are also unsatisfactory; the former are cheery, laddish men tending to be under five foot six and almost the same across the shoulder, the latter are chuckling lunatics with a fondness for submission holds and women in impractical swimwear. Puritanical and sovereign, I stalk from their classroom without a second look—but this leaves me with a problem. Judo is as much sport as self-defence. T’ai chi is fluid and elegant but requires an entire lifetime to be usable in combat. More esoteric—and, to be honest, no softer than karate—escrima and silat are not taught anywhere within an hour of Cricklewood Cove. I look in desperation at Mary Sensei, and perhaps, this once, my need is enough.
    â€œYes,” Mary Sensei says, “there’s one more thing we can try.”
    Which is how, for the first time
without
Gonzo Lubitsch, I come to be standing on the doorstep of Wu Shenyang, seeking admittance to the House of the Voiceless Dragon.
    â€œWu like
woo,
” Mary Sensei said two minutes ago, strangely breathless in her aged VW Rabbit as we sat waiting for the precise appointed hour, “and then Shen and Yang as if they were separate, but they’re not. And you don’t call him Wu Shenyang, anyway, you call him Mister Wu. Or Master Wu. Or . . .” But she could not think of anything else I might call him and anyway it’s time. The door opens. An excited voice says “Come, come!” and I watch my feet take me across the threshold.
    Mister (Master) Wu is the first teacher of whatever sort to ask me to his home, and he is the first martial arts instructor who has wanted to know me off the mat before seeing me perform on it. According to Mary Sensei, if he does not find what he is looking for in my heart, there will be no point in testing the rest of me. I inspect my heart, and it seems an impoverished organ for such a big task. It is the right sort of size and located not as moviegoers believe in the high left side of the chest (that is in fact a lung) but just off centre and further down. It beats approximately seventy times a minute and pumps vital nutrients and oxygen carried by haemoglobin around my body in the approved fashion, but it conceals as far as I can tell no mysteries, and is devoid of secret heritage or