Strange Tales from Liaozhai - Vol. 2

by Pu Songling, Sidney L. Sondergard (Translator, Contributor)

The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories (also known as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio) into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales.

This is the second of 6 volumes.

799 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1740

About the author

Pu Songling (simplified Chinese: 蒲松龄; traditional Chinese: 蒲松齡; pinyin: Pú Sōnglíng; Wade–Giles: P'u Sung-ling, June 5, 1640—February 25, 1715) was a Qing Dynasty Chinese writer, best known as the author of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.

Pu was born into a poor landlord-merchant family from Zichuan (淄川, now Zibo, Shandong). At the age of nineteen, he received the gongsheng degree in the civil service examination, but it was not until he was seventy-one that he received the xiucai degree.

He spent most of his life working as a private tutor, and collecting the stories that were later published in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Some critics attribute the Vernacular Chinese novel Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan to him.

Reviews

[Andre · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this volume the editor really managed to piss me off. Not only did we get another case of more than 20 pages of introduction, he states: "Interestingly, Pu doesn't condemn He's sexual interest in the title character because he thinks its inherently wrong, but because it is fruitless: "a man's backside is barren ground, and nothing will grow there."
I decided right there and then that I will be the judge of that. Since I noticed that a lot of fans of classic Chinese culture tend to downplay its homophobic elements.

For some reason the editor did not start anew with the page numbers but continued to number the pages from the previous volume, so I switched to counting percentages here and no longer pages.

And at this time my experience with this author started to show, as I could identify right away that the hunting daughter was supernatural after all (she became a ghost) and after she is long reincarnated and times comes for reunion, the guy magically becomes younger and his sons are already grown and his only now mentioned wife has died. Such things are pretty damn typical for this selection at this point.
And it became more and more apparent for me that these longer stories are not memorable on average. Shorter stories, like the one about the two guys being tricked into sleeping with stones and a latrine is more likely to stick in my head in the future. Of the longer ones, only the stories called “The Yaksha Kingdom” and “The Rakshasas’s sea market” were more memorable, even though they were also long. And seriously, what is it with the author and these long ass tales? They are so damn long and blend together, I will never be able to remember them. Stories about hibernating dragons, sea monsters and magical girls are way more memorable than these stories about the millionth family drama. Sure, some shorter ones had the issue as well (e.g. one I could only remember the element of that the fox transformed into a pig, as this was a first) but it seemed much more frequent with the long ones. These shorter stories are more memorable. Also, I wonder whether in that one story the fox truly transformed into a dog or supposedly just was confused with one. And in another one I wonder whether the girl is a ghost resurrected by foxes or a fox herself. She states she was human once and the story refers to her as a fox concubine. The end seems to say that she was a fox, but how can a human die and become a fox without reincarnation? I have never heard of something like that before.
And despite this book being called strange stories, a lot seems quite mundane to me. Even the supernatural ones and so I start asking more questions, like not only do I wonder why those foxes don't use their magic to get into the house, as they can do that, but apparently the fox girl moving in with the humans is fine but not the other way around. And unlike this story, the story of the begging monk who gets annoyed, commits suicide and whose corpse disappears from the grave is truly strange.
But we had several novelties here: Sex to chase off/Kill foxes (one was raped to death), a dragon hibernating within a book case and emerging as something like a golden centipede before flying away and a story with a female protagonist, that actually has a name. There have been only two prior stories with female protagonists in these stories before and neither had a name.

And shortly after we came to the beforementioned story which the editor called "Huang the Ninth" and we already have some very questionable elements: The protagonist He has to urge Huang to take off some clothes, beg him to "make love" under tears and Huang scolds him to "force love like a beast" and when he leaves He, He wastes away. Huang almost has to be forced to enter the house again and Huang tells He that sex has not much benefit for him and is harmful for He and Huang doesn't like the sex. And it was getting worse afterwards. Huang sleeps with He because he wants medicine for his mother, tells him that he will find a girl more pretty than him for He and when Huang doesn't return earlier, He "said many reproachful things" to him. Huang says that it all can only lead to disaster, they have sex every night and the doctor says that He has a "ghost pulse" and He died. And Huang did not cry because he loved He romantically, but because He did not listen to him. The editor tries to justify this story by referring to the inability of homosexual sex to produce children and possibility of shitting during anal sex. But gay sex is described as definitely lethal here and it has nothing to with Huang being a fox (even though you might think) as fox sex is not lethal by definition in the other stories so far and is neither here. They even use the lethal gay sex later, after the reincarnated He has married a fox girl [so the fox nature is not the lethal part], to kill someone and in prior stories Pu had used sex/rape to kill, so neither author nor editor can claim it’s all about procreation now.
Granted, what I learned about normative Chinese attitudes towards homosexuality during the times of the author doesn’t make this presentation unusual, but homophobic nonetheless.

Thankfully there were some highpoints as well. That one story with the woman being a daughter to a doctor was surprising because the beautiful woman was not supernatural for once, well maybe, it was still odd to see how lightly she moved and how quickly she disappeared. Also, the next story has a ghost girl again and somehow this time they have sex with ghosts allegedly shortening your lifespan.
But still, leave it to the author to be both sexist (by saying that if Sanguan was an assassin her brothers must be even more manly) and classist (by questioning how a low social rank family like Yu Jiang's could have produced such an "excellent, brave boy"). At least he didn't make some sexist remarks regarding Xiao'er. And Disney should have adapted her story instead of Mulan's. There is so much magic, romance and marriage, plus family drama and slight daddy issues in this that it should fit them perfectly.

This volume was the one where we had a first case of the author’s remark being longer than the story itself (about a mysterious black beast). In fact, his remark has not much to do with the story itself and sounds rather like he wanted to proselytize. In another remark he suddenly stated that the son became a cricket. When? Where? What makes Pu think that? His remarks are not only annoying but often without connection to the stories.

The story of Qingmei and Xi is really an outlier here. No other female led story was so long or had so much estrogen in it. Men are secondary here and it is mostly about Qingmei and Xi. I wonder whether it has something to say that Qingmei is the daughter of a fox. The next story however, called “The Rakshas's sea market” confirms my suspicion that this story is racist against Indians. I knew it already. And just like the story of Qingmei and Xi is probably not from Pu, neither is the one featuring a concubine with weapons skills.

No idea what is weirder about one story, the woman being pregnant with a dragon that goes back into the womb when the others see it or that after incense burning and magic by an old neighbor the born girl comes out after a lot of big scales and has "flesh as sparkling and clear as crystal, so you could actually count all of her internal organs."

Can’t really say anything regarding the ending as there is none, it will continue in the next volume. However, there is one thing still to say: How often does the editor want to tell us what xuicai and hu mean? And so many other words? Doing it once per book is fine, but not so many times, over and over in the same book!!!

[gowri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can't speak on the translation but the stories felt a bit repetitive and for lack of a better term didn't age well 🤷🏽‍♀️