Notes from a Hedgehog

From Details of “Winter,“ a portfolio that appears in the Winter 1976 issue of The Paris Review.

Yan Lianke’s story “Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, appears in the Fall 2025 issue of The Paris Review.

When an author is blocked from publication in his own country yet cannot live anywhere else, he finds himself being both debated and yelled at, attacked and beloved, forgotten but always remembered again, like a hedgehog that, for whatever reason, has to crawl along human pathways, surrounded by onlookers, getting kicked and shunted with sticks into the undergrowth, though there will inevitably be some people who find this creature as important as life itself and gently swaddle it in their clothes to carry it to an uninhabited part of the forest. Yet that hedgehog will crawl back onto the path whenever the sun is out.

Because the sun shines on that forest path.

Because the hedgehog longs for sunlight.

That’s how things are, cyclical and repetitious, repetitious and cyclical. Might the day come when the hedgehog expires on that sunlit path?

Since turning sixty, I’ve thought about death every single day.

Each night, I take my sleeping pills and think about the inevitability of my passing. The pills don’t just curb my insomnia; more importantly, they help me forget death, so I can wake up the next day, watch the sun climb slowly over the sill, sit by the brightly lit window, and pick up my pen to put my thoughts to paper. A hedgehog crawling once again onto the sunlit path. In this way, one day long after my sixtieth birthday, I’ll accept the inevitability of death, just as I accept that the world didn’t necessarily gain a person after my birth and it won’t necessarily lose a person after I’m gone. All this will give me a little more equanimity in the face of death. My inescapable passing feels congruent with something else in my life: laboring for three to five years to produce a book, not because it will be published in simplified Chinese, or in traditional characters for the Hong Kong or Taiwan markets, and definitely not so that it can be translated into all sorts of languages and published across the world, but simply writing for the sake of writing, which has granted me a degree of freedom so that I can address this story, unfettered, to my son, and when he is elderly he too can pass it on to his offspring. A long, long time after my death, when I am dust and even my coffin, my clothes, and my bones have crumbled away, when sunlight has infiltrated the woods and no one needs to scurry along like a hedgehog in search of light any longer, one of my descendants will quietly pull out my manuscript and hand it over to the public. What will happen then?

I imagine that, at the very least, my descendants and some readers—or maybe just a single reader—will read this novel, sigh, and murmur, “Ah, so our ancestors once thought and wrote like this.”

Purely for the sake of this sigh that will come at some unspecified point in the distant future, I threw myself into writing for the sake of writing. For more than two years I wrote every day, without pause, until I had completed a manuscript of more than three hundred thousand words. Looking at the reams of paper, I interrogated myself:

What kind of person are you?

What kind of author are you?

Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality. Which makes me think of the odd qualities of my writing, the parts that people find hard to swallow. I’m eking out a living in the real world, but at the same time I’m an eccentric striving tirelessly for the sake of the strangeness of my writing. I’m not proud of this oddness, nor am I ashamed of it, just as the hedgehog does not let its ugliness and unpopularity prevent it from seeking out the sunlit forest path.

After finishing the novel that I wrote for no reason, I rested for a short while before beginning the work of revising it.

This novel was very much like a hedgehog crawling along for years in search of the sun, not just because it was covered in off-putting spikes but also because deep in its soul it had a bizarre, damp, forest-y reek that made it unbearable to others. And yet these are precisely the characteristics of a hedgehog that set it apart as a species. Might there not be novels that, because they are covered in spikes and smell peculiar, gain the stature of literature?

I live for this strangeness.

I write because of this oddness and these peculiar smells.

In order to make the strangeness of my novel-with-no-purpose even more intense and pure, I spent two years revising and trimming it, over and over again. When I grew weary, I would put down my pen and instead compose a short story or two, in order to give myself some breathing room. Nothing about those stories, from their characters to their plots, or even their styles, had anything at all to do with the novel. Yet in their way of thinking and their spirit, they are just as strange and smell just as odd. I wouldn’t dare step away from this strangeness. My plan is to produce more than ten short stories between periods of working on my novel; just like the novel, they will be written for no purpose except the pursuit of eccentricity. These short stories will not be an extension or appendage of the novel, but rather they will reflect one another while existing in their own spaces, all for the sake of placing strange sights and smells into readers’ hands. When the hedgehog finally tracks down the sun, it will offer warmth and affection back to the world.

“Plants, Stones, Dirt, and Sky” is merely the first story in this collection. This is probably not the sort of story that every reader will enjoy, in terms of its language and narration, its characters and their emotions, or its depiction of the burgeoning and decline of life. Indeed, in the vast land of 1.4 billion people where I live, some have already disdained it for its strangeness, just as they scorn the hedgehog’s stench.

The world needs bizarre and loathsome writing to crop up from time to time, even if readers dislike it, or else authors will cease to exist in this world. It is this strangeness that enables literature to carry on and thrive.

 

Yan Lianke’s China Story, a novel, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in 2026, in translation by Jeremy Tiang. This essay was also translated by Jeremy Tiang, who is a novelist, a playwright, and the translator of more than thirty books from the Chinese.