When Gao Xingjian (
Nevertheless, he is regularly touted, especially in America, as the foremost comic writer currently at work in China. This new publication is a collection of eight of his short stories, several of them a decade and more old, but none the worse for that.
The book contains one absolute masterpiece, entitled The Cure. In a cold dawn during the Cultural Revolution, a father and his small son wait under a bridge. Above, the assembled village watches as four people are executed while the sun rises. The bodies are then thrown over the parapet, at which the father quickly cuts out the gall bladder from one of them, and takes it home to make tea to cure his mother's cataracts.
This brief tale of horror, which should surely be reprinted worldwide, appears to confirm from within China the accusation made in Sid Smith's recent award-winning novel Something Like a House that the organs of the Red Guards' victims were routinely removed by villagers in remote areas of China for medicinal purposes.
Mo Yan is no stranger to grotesque and horrific scenes. Indeed, you could say they were his meat and drink as cannibalism features large in his books. His novel The Republic of Wine, for instance, centered around the cooking and eating of unwanted children, albeit in a surreal and dreamlike context.
This new book's title story (recently filmed by Zhang Yimou (
He hits on the idea of converting an old bus, abandoned in woods on a mountainside, into a lovers' retreat, what in Taiwan would be a room in a hotel offering couples two hours of "rest." At first things go splendidly and the man can't believe how much money he's making. Then one day in the middle of winter, just when he's thinking of shutting up shop until the spring, a strange pair arrive and rent the space. It would be a pity to give away the twist in the tale, but take it from me it's not exactly world-shattering. That this is ostensibly the book's main offering doesn't raise one's hopes very high for what's to come.
Another tale, Man and Beast, paints the picture of a Chinese contract worker stranded in the mountains of Japan's Hokkaido during World War II. He lives in a cave where his closest companions are bears, wolves and foxes, particularly the last whose lair he has commandeered. They eventually attack him, and he falls, along with them, to the floor of the forest below. There he encounters a Japanese woman, but is too disgusted to touch her. End of story.
The initial situation, in other words, is promising, but the development is weak. Another tale, Love Story, elicits the same response. In a remote rural community during the 1960s a young boy is attracted to a city woman from a bourgeois background. He thinks she will never look at him, but offers her a carrot as a present nonetheless. It transpires that her need is as great as his. (By now we're on the story's last page). They grab each other, and the following year she gives birth to twins. You'll be excused if your response is "So what?"
Three of the tales -- about a bride who can fly, a child who eats iron, and a couple trying to find an apparently non-existent garden -- can best be regarded as sardonic parables. But the final story turns out to be the second best thing in the book, an only partly fictional meditation on the abandoning of unwanted girl infants in modern China.
The volume contains a Preface in which the author ruminates on his origins in desperate poverty, where he ate lumps of coal with genuine relish, and his role today as a rough-and-ready writer with no knowledge of literary theories and a natural feeling for peasant life.
The feeling these stories give is that Mo Yan casts them off as casually as a snake casts off its skin, and then, like the snake, curls up and goes to sleep. His laughter is that of a big man who makes his listeners laugh as a matter of routine. He doesn't appear to have any political ax to grind, and says as much in his preface.
As a result he serves his English-language publishers well. On the one hand, he mocks everything in sight with a fantasy worthy of Rabelais, but on the other he is a mainstream writer working in China. He's thus set apart from the veritable army of emigree authors lambasting the horrors of the Cultural Revolution from the relative safety of the US.
Here, by contrast, is a novelist writing in contemporary China whose views are critical enough to please a Western readership, but not sufficiently outspoken to offend his political masters to the point of getting himself ostracized, banned or imprisoned.
One criticism has to be made -- at first sight the book doesn't appear to be a collection of stories at all. Short stories generally sell less well than novels, and neither the front cover nor the title page mentions that this is a story collection.
It's only if you turn to the list of contents or read the blurb that you realize what kind of publication this is.
But try to read The Cure. It's worth the book's price on its own.
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