Eventually the two levels of the book become interwoven. Then, at the end, in a concluding feat of conjuring, Mo Yan describes himself as taking a hard sleeper from Beijing to Liquorland. There, Mo Yan the author and Mo Yan the quasi-fictional recipient of Li Yidou's letters, finally merge. As one of them puts it, "I'm the hermit crab, and Mo Yan is the shell I'm occupying." Li Yidou also not unexpectedly makes an appearance in the flesh. But Mo Yan clearly feels the need to bring off something really original, and this is the first novel I have read in which the author wanders around the locations he has created, like a film director strolling through his sets, commenting on how he could better have described this or that in the main part of the story.
This is Mo Yan, in high modernist style, playing with the very foundations of fiction. He ends the book with an unpunctuated monologue reminiscent of Molly Bloom's dream-like meanderings that conclude Joyce's Ulysses, the most famous Western novel in this modernist, experimental vein.
But readers familiar with Western literature will already have been reminded early on of Swift's eighteenth century satire A Modest Proposal (which centers on cooked children), and possibly also of Gogol's 19th century theatrical farce The Government Inspector. These influences are made all the more credible by a number of references to classic Western authors in the character Mo Yan's letters to Li Yidou.
The entire novel is replete with the kinds of detail common to writers of over-the-top farce and scatological fantasy, of whom Rabelais is the most famous in the West. People collapse into open sewers, fetuses aborted in accordance with China's one-child policy are enthusiastically consumed, and repulsive bodily details of every kind are in evidence -- stinking breath, hemorrhoids and wine glasses of urine (of which "the Japanese prime minister" is stated to drink one a day for health reasons).
If, in other words, you want past Western styles re-energized with Chinese characteristics, then this is it. Arcade promise us another Mo Yan novel next year, Big Breasts and Wide Hips. All in all, Mo Yan now seems to be, most triumphantly, wholly and satisfyingly out of control.
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