The Way of the Bow
By Paulo Coelho
‘Tetsuya.’
The boy looked at the stranger, startled.
‘No one in this city has ever seen Tetsuya holding a bow,’ he replied. ‘Everyone here knows him as a carpenter.’
‘Maybe he gave up, maybe he lost his courage, that doesn’t matter to me,’ insisted the stranger. ‘But he cannot be considered to be the best archer in the country if he has abandoned his art. That’s why I’ve been traveling all these days, to challenge him and put an end to a reputation he no longer deserves.’
The boy saw there was no point in arguing; it was best to take the man to the carpenter’s shop so that he could see with his own eyes that he was mistaken.
Tetsuya was in the workshop at the back of his house. He turned to see who had come in, but his smile froze when his eyes fell on the long bag that the stranger was carrying.
‘It’s exactly what you think it is,’ said the new arrival. ‘I did not come here to humiliate or to provoke the man who has become a legend. I would simply like to prove that, after all my years of practice, I have managed to reach perfection.’
Tetsuya made it as if to resume his work: he was just putting the legs on a table.
‘A man who served as an example for a whole generation cannot just disappear as you did,’ the stranger went on. ‘I followed your teachings, I tried to respect the way of the bow, and I deserve to have you watch me shoot. If you do this, I will go away and I will never tell anyone where to find the greatest of all masters.’
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Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho de Souza (born 24 August 1947) is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. His 1988 novel The Alchemist was an international best-seller.
Career
In 1982, Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make a substantial impact. In 1986 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it “of bad quality.” After making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage, published in 1987.
While trying to overcome his procrastination about launching his writing career, Coelho decided, “If I see a white feather today, that is a sign that God is giving me that I have to write a new book.” Seeing one in the window of a shop, he began writing that day. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist and published it through a small Brazilian publishing house that made an initial print run of 900 copies and decided not to reprint it. He subsequently founded a bigger publishing house, and with the publication of his next book Brida, The Alchemist took off. HarperCollins decided to publish the book in 1994. Later it became an international bestseller. In a 2009 interview with the Syrian Forward Magazine, Coelho stated that the Sufi tradition had been an influence on him, particularly when writing The Alchemist and later The Zahir.
Since the publication of The Alchemist, Coelho has generally written at least one novel every two years. Four of them – The Pilgrimage, Hippie, The Valkyries, and Aleph – are autobiographical, while the majority of the rest are broadly fictional. Other books, like Maktub, The Manual of the Warrior of Light, and Like the Flowing River, are collections of essays, newspaper columns, or selected teachings. His work has been published in more than 170 countries and translated into eighty-three languages. Together, his books have sold 320 million copies. On 22 December 2016, Coelho was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 2 in the list of 200 most influential contemporary authors.
However, reactions to his writing have not been without dissension. Though he was raised in a Catholic family and describes himself as of that faith even now, his stance has been described as incompatible with the Catholic faith, because of its New Age, pantheist, and relativist contents. And whatever his sales, reviews of Coelho’s later work consistently note its superficiality.
In 2016, he was contacted by basketball player Kobe Bryant, who wanted to discuss a children’s book project with him. Some months before Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash in January 2020, they started to write the book together, but upon hearing about his passing, Coelho decided to delete the whole draft, saying in an interview that “it didn’t make any sense to publish without him.” He did not say how many pages had been written or whether the book had a title.
Paulo Coelho
