Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 1 Read online

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Volume One

  Pu Songling

  Translated and Annotated by

  Sidney L. Sondergard

  Illustrations by Ben Grant, Matt Howarth,

  Christopher Peterson, and Megan Williams

  JAIN PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Fremont, California

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pu, Songling, 1640-1715.

  [聊斋志异 Liao zhai zhi yi. English]

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai / Pu Songling ; translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard ; Illustrations by Ben Grant ... [et al.]

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Summary: “The subjects of Pu Songling’s short story collection include supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhism and Daoism, and Chinese folklore”--Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-89581-001-4 (vol. 1 : alk. paper)

  I. Sondergard, Sidney L. II. Title.

  PL2722.U2L513 2008

  398.20951--dc22

  2008020137

  Cover art by Matt Howarth.

  Copyright © 2008 by Sidney L. Sondergard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I. The Mystery of the Disappearing Artist: Pu Songling’s Voice and Persona in the Stories

  II. Pu Songling’s Exercise of the Fox Tradition: Moral Allegory and Social Critique

  Preface: Liaozhai’s Own Account

  The Tales

  1. Taking the Examination to Become Town God

  2. The Man in the Ear

  3. The Restless Corpse

  4. Squirting

  5. The People in the Pupils Communicate

  6. The Frescoed Wall

  7. The Mountain Spirit

  8. Biting the Ghost

  9. Catching a Fox

  10. Something Strange in the Buckwheat

  11. Goblins in the House

  12. Sixth Brother Wang

  13. Stealing Peaches

  14. Sowing Pears

  15. The Daoist of Laoshan

  16. The Changqing Monk

  17. The Snake Man

  18. Chopping the Python

  19. The Adulterous Dog

  20. The Hail God

  21. The Fox Marries Off His Daughter

  22. Jiaona

  23. The Buddhist Monk’s Sin

  24. Sorcery

  25. The Feral Dog

  26. Three Lives

  27. The Fox Hides in a Jug

  28. The Weeping Ghosts

  29. The Zhending Girl

  30. Jiaoming

  31. Scholar Ye

  32. Forty Thousand

  33. Cheng the Immortal

  34. The Bridegroom

  35. The Magistrate of the Heavenly and Mortal Worlds

  36. Wang Lan

  37. The Eagle and Tiger Gods

  38. Wang Cheng

  39. Qingfeng

  40. Painted Skin

  41. The Merchant’s Son

  42. A Craving for Snake

  43. Jin Shicheng

  44. Scholar Dong

  45. Chomping on Stones

  46. The Temple Demon

  47. Official Lu

  48. Yingning

  49. Nie Xiaoqian

  50. The Faithful Mouse

  51. An Earthquake

  52. The Lord of the Sea

  53. Ding Qianxi

  54. The Whales Surface

  55. Old Master Zhang

  56. The Shuimang Herb

  57. Creating Livestock

  58. The Scholar from Fengyang

  59. Geng Shiba

  60. Zhu’er

  61. The Tiny Gentleman

  62. Fourth Sister Hu

  63. Old Man Zhu

  64. The Alligator

  65. A Certain Gentleman

  66. The Sharp Sword

  67. The Swordswoman

  68. The Drinking Buddy

  69. Lian Xiang

  70. A-Bao

  71. King of the Nine Mountains

  72. The Foxes in the Zunhua Office

  73. Zhang Cheng

  74. The Fenzhou Fox

  75. Qiaoniang

  76. The Wu Official

  77. Ventriloquism

  78. The Fox Duo

  79. The Wei County Fox

  80. Hongyu

  81. Dragons

  82. Fourth Lady Lin

  83. In the River

  Works Cited

  Acknowledgments

  For all the many reasons that he wrote these tales, from reflecting his love of the otherworldly to providing a natural extension of his work as a teacher, Pu Songling composed them most importantly to be enjoyed by a broad audience, not just by literary scholars. For over three hundred years this has indeed been their legacy in China, and I have tried while preparing this translation to remain respectful of that popular tradition. Many of these stories are unapologetically earthy, but never crude; they are occasionally quite violent or disturbing, but never gratuitously so; and they are frequently sad, but never morose or maudlin. What makes them so compelling is a barely-contained exuberance of tone that celebrates their excursions into the world of ghosts, demons, foxes, and immortals.

  For this first complete translation of Strange Tales from Liaozhai into English, I have attempted to follow Pu Songling’s syntax, punctuation, and phrasings faithfully, providing annotations for the reader when he makes allusions to personages or events unfamiliar to English readers, and I have profited enormously from the unabridged and newly-annotated edition of the liaozhai zhi yi edited by Zhu Qikai, published in Beijing (1995), my source text for the tales. In those cases where a long series of clauses has made it difficult or awkward for the reader to follow the flow of Pu’s images, I have subdivided them into discrete sentences. I have resisted idiomatizing Pu’s writing because I have found that translations which attempt to appeal to the slang and colloquialisms of the translator’s immediate contemporaries tend, like topical humor, not to age well.

  I wish to thank the Freeman Foundation for the generous grant support that allowed me to pursue research in 2005 on Pu Songling’s life and work at Zibo and other sites in Shandong province. Every trip to China has been filled with serendipitous discoveries for me; I often share the astonishment there of Pu’s characters, who, walking the mundane world one moment, in an instant find themselves in the presence of wonders.

  My laoshi and colleague, Cai Hong/Anne Csete, has been keenly supportive of my efforts to translate Pu Songling’s stories, and I wish to express my profound gratitude for her generosity of spirit and her scholarly devotion. I am particularly indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editors, Li Lin and Helen Zhang Peng, who have painstakingly reviewed my
pinyin transliterations and have offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text, then, must fall solely to me. I wish as well to recognize my enthusiastic Editorial Assistants, Hu Shan, Hu Wensi, Liu Nan, Liu Ying, Shen Chaoer, Shen Wanghui, Wang Yifan, Wang Yingying, Yang Huidong, Yang Shanshan, Ying Lin, Zhou Jiayi, Zhou Lining, Zhou Nan, and Zhu Liang, for their careful proofreading. My gratitude also extends to Zhu Yimei for her support of the Editorial Assistants.

  If you would like to receive copies of the transliterations of any of the particular stories in this volume, please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected], and I will gladly send electronic copies to you.

  Since black and white illustrations are a traditional complement for Pu Songling’s stories in popular Chinese editions, I solicited the artwork of Ben Grant, Matt Howarth, Christopher Peterson, and Megan Williams as unique individual responses to some of Pu’s strange tales. I admire and treasure the results of their efforts.

  For raising the kinds of questions that are always useful for me to ponder, for listening with genuine interest as I read each new translation aloud, I am indebted to Ran Rongming/Ramona Ralston, 我的妻和我的生。

  Introduction

  I. The Mystery of the Disappearing Artist: Pu Songling’s Voice and Persona in the Stories

  In 2004, I was visiting a small town in southwest Henan province called Xinye, because of its importance to the epic narrative of the Three Kingdoms (sanguo yan yi), when my two students and I were invited to the local office of the Ministry of Culture. There I was asked what Chinese literary works I had been teaching or researching, so I included a description of my project to translate all of Pu Songling’s stories into English. One woman took me aside and confidentially told me, with no little pride, that her family had hidden their copy of Strange Tales from Liaozhai (liaozhai zhi yi) during the Cultural Revolution and refused to give it up when the call came around for subversive literature to be surrendered and destroyed. Since then, I’ve heard several similar testimonies. The Chinese people have a powerful affection for this collection of tales of the supernatural, the folkloric, and the simply odd, an affection due in part to the belief that Pu Songling (1640-1715) was acting as a moralist. As an early modern Aesop, Pu offered his readers entertainment, edification, and—perhaps most attractive of all—a heart-felt critique of the bureacratic structure of early Qing dynasty China. Although the imperial civil service retained its own idealistic mythology of maintaining a scholarly meritocracy and Confucian social philosophy through a system of advancement-by examination, the reality was that it was deeply flawed by a tradition of corruption and abuses of power already centuries old by the time Pu composed his weird short fiction.

  At the heart of this collection of 494 short stories is a mystery that in some ways is as fascinating as the magic performed by Daoist priests or shape-shifting foxes: the author’s depiction of himself as a mere editor rather than as the stories’ creator, or at very least as the craftsman who gives them their literary shape. In the idiosyncratically personal postscripts or addenda that accompany many of his tales, Pu refers to himself as yi shi shi, adapting the model of historiographer Sima Qian to identify himself as the archivist, or historian, of the strange tales. I’ve chosen to translate shi as “collector” to honor the traditions surrounding the manuscript’s compilation. Pu pointedly notes in his preface to the collection that individuals from all over China “who share my enthusiasm for the unusual have sent me stories by post,” and he modestly claims that “I have written down what I have heard, and this collection is the result.” This assertion was reiterated by the author’s grandson, Pu Lide (1683-1751), and later authors such as Zou Tao (fl. ca. 1884) have also perpetuated the story of Pu’s solicitation of stories from travelers who would stop when offered some tea and relate their unusual stories and experiences to him (Hammond 206-7). At the Pu Songling theme park outside Zibo City (near Pu’s home village of Zichuan) in Shandong province, visitors are shown the Liuquan (Willow Spring) Well, “the very well” from which Master Pu, then in his thirties, drew the water to make the tea that he served his story-telling visitors from a thatched shed nearby.

  Pu’s self-deprecation, his deemphasis of himself as author, is further exhibited in the nickname that he gave to his writing studio and incorporated into the title of his story collection: Liaozhai, the “studio of chit-chat” or “studio of leisure” (I’ve also seen this translated as “studio of idleness”). This is the place where he crafted the narratives for his story collection, where he constructed the descriptions of visitations, manifestations, and possessions that characterize the majority of his tales. But to credit the stories to his studio (although Liaozhai was also a nickname Pu took for himself) is another way for him to resist taking credit for their existence. There are two tensions, then, at the heart of the mystery of Pu’s reluctant authorship: the first consists of a compulsion to retreat from making any claims for himself to fame or to literary talent, while simultaneously desiring to demonstrate his knowledge of literary tradition and his aptitude for narrative prose by presenting his collection as a literary work rather than as a compendium of interviews or field reports.1 As you’ll see, many of the stories open with assertions of the impressive reputations of their scholar protagonists or of their main characters’ extraordinary talents.

  The second tension involves his adopting a persona in the often moralistic addenda to his stories that is at times reminiscent of the philosophical commentaries by other great Shandong thinkers—like Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius). Of the eighty-three stories included here, Pu writes formal postscripts in his own voice for twenty-six of them, though he often intrudes in first-person narrative voice, as when he speculates about whether the magician in “Stealing Peaches” (tou tao) was actually a practising descendant of the Song dynasty’s mystic White Lotus Cult, or offers a stoic reflection on life and death at the end of “Forty Thousand” (si shi qian). At the same time that he takes the opportunity of telling the tales in order to offer explicit and implicit object lessons, Pu also embraces the irrationality of the magical world for its own sake, empathizing with troubled spirits and supporting the punishment of those who compromise principles of social justice for personal gain, arguing that encounters with the inexplicable may help to reorient or to guide an individual positively.

  The preface to the collection, entitled “Liaozhai’s Own Account” (liaozhai zi zhi), clearly reveals Pu Songling’s ambivalence about his role as author. While he’s a self-professed fan of strange tales (who sees himself as a literary inheritor of writers like Song dynasty poet Su Shi, enthusiastically asserting that “I, too, delight in hearing ghost stories”), he also feels so undervalued that he fears the “only ones who truly know me are those spirits of the green woods and of the dark places we cannot pass!” With typical self-effacement, he attributes the authorship of the tales to fellow aficionados who have sent them to him, “since things tend to gravitate to those who appreciate them,” yet he also acknowledges that he’s learned from experience that “the cultivation of my pen and ink yields me as little as a monk’s begging bowl,” which makes it all the more “lamentable that I have so many hopes riding on it.” Nevertheless, his brief preface is sprinkled self-consciously with literary allusions to eight different writers, betraying a desire to display his knowledge of the tradition that he wishes his collection to extend, and implying that he wishes his anthology to be considered a literary work rather than a mere accumulation of others’ words. Perhaps the authorial presence that he’s surrendering here is simply replaced by a different investment of emotion in his seeming identification with the undervalued scholars of his stories, from Zhou, a man framed by enemies and removed from a list of successful civil service examinees (“Cheng the Immortal” [cheng xian]), to Xing Chou, a successful candidate in the highest level of the imperial civil service examination, who is rewarded for having once saved another person’s life by being reborn as a
n official, thanks to the support of the Hell King (“A Certain Gentleman” [mou gong]).2

  Though he fails to acknowledge his own artistry when doing so, Pu uses the composition of poetry by characters in the stories as a means of paying tribute to authorial integrity and veneration, to literature’s power to confer immortality through memorial verse (as Fourth Lady Lin [lin si niang] does when she writes a poem for Chen, her beloved, just prior to being reincarnated), and even to poetry serving as a vehicle to instill humility by measuring the limits of one’s talents (as “The Fox Duo” [hu lian] demonstrates when a pair of female foxes unsuccessfully attempt to seduce a scholar by tricking him into competing in a poetry contest that will end up with them all in bed together—recognizing the impossibility of beating them at their game, the scholar simply refuses to participate). The hand behind the verse in the stories, of course, is Pu’s own, additional evidence of his craft as an author; moreover, his specific commitment to poetry was confirmed as early as 1660, when at the age of 20 he helped friends organize the Yingzhou Poem Society.

  The addenda which Pu appends to his tales place him in the position of social critic, yet they also seem to function for him as self-justification, self-authorization, and even self-admonition, as he explicitly praises the deeds of worthy characters and warns of the consequences of misjudging others. The individuals whom Pu lauds most effusively are generally underappreciated in some manner, like the title character of such stories as “Yu Jiang,” who’s praised for his exemplary bravery despite his impoverished background. He also includes a number of stories that warn of the negative consequences of judging by appearance, like “Yingning,” where the quasi-hebephrenic laughter of the female protagonist is nearly allowed to obscure the fact of her compassion and filial devotion, or like “Painted Skin” (hua pi), in which superficial attraction to a woman’s beauty is not only deceiving—it almost kills scholar Wang.3

  Joined with the respect his stories frequently show for undervalued scholars, these emphases call to mind the writer’s own adventures and misadventures in his attempts to secure preferment through the imperial civil service examination system. At the age of eighteen, Pu passed the county level examination (xianshi), and later the two examinations at the prefectural level (fushi and yuanshi), receiving his licentiate (xiucai) certification. He failed his subsequent attempts at the provincial level examination (xiangshi) which was offered every three years (Hucker 233), and he seems to have made his final official attempt at the age of fifty, in 1690. He was disqualified in the 1687 examination under the pretext that he had submitted inappropriate content—that is, he skipped a page in his essay book. He didn’t complete the 1690 examination; we don’t know why he failed in 1660, 1663, 1666, 1672, and 1678. Frustration over his repeated attempts helps to suggest why some of his stories explicitly celebrate successful circumvention of the entire examination system: even the very first story, “Taking the Examination to Become Town God” (kao chenghuang) opens with the success story of the “grandfather of my elder sister’s husband,” Song Tao, whose talents qualify him to be directly summoned to a markedly “higher” level examination by immortals, superceding the conventional process before the civil examiner even arrives. The notion of reading personal resonance in Pu’s stories is nothing new; one nineteenth-century commentator, for example, explicitly reads “Scholar Ye” (ye sheng) as Pu’s “own covert autobiography” (Zeitlin 51), which hardly seems surprising, given that Pu laments that Scholar Ye is someone whose talents go unappreciated despite his being a resourceful person who is “serious and clear-minded all the time.”