Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 5 Read online

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Volume Five

  Pu Songling

  Translated and Annotated by

  Sidney L. Sondergard

  Illustrations by Leah Farrar, Matt Howarth, Sarah Lawrence, and Christopher Peterson

  JAIN PUBLISHING COMPANY

  Fremont, California

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pu, Songling, 1640-1715.

  聊斋志异 (Liaozhai zhi yi.)

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai / Pu Songling ; translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard ; Illustrations by Leah Farrar ... [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 978-0-89581-049-6 (vol. 5 : alk. paper)

  I. Sondergard, Sidney L. II. Title.

  PL2722.U2L513 2012

  398.20951--dc22

  2008020137

  Cover art by Matt Howarth.

  Copyright © 2012 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. Pu Songling, Paranormal Investigator: The Author as Phenomenologist

  II. Natural Wisdom and Daoist Magic in Pu Songling’s Tales

  The Tales

  331. Xing Ziyi

  332. Scholar Li

  333. Lu Yaguan

  334. Court Historian Jiang

  335. Shao Shimei

  336. Scholar Gu

  337. Chen Xijiu

  338. Shao from Linzi

  339. Yu Qu’e

  340. The Rowdy Scholar

  341. The Cheng People’s Ability

  342. Fengxian

  343. Traveler Tong

  344. The Army in Liaoyang

  345. Gongshi Zhang

  346. Ainu

  347. A Shanfu Magistrate

  348. Sun Bizhen

  349. A Man from My Home Town

  350. Gold and Silver Ore

  351. Examining the Stone

  352. Mt. Wuyi

  353. The Mighty Rat

  354. Zhang Buliang

  355. The Shepherds

  356. The Wealthy Old Man

  357. Minister of War Wang

  358. The Emperor of the Eastern Mountain

  359. Xiaomei

  360. The Monk’s Medicine

  361. Vice Censor Yu

  362. The Yamen Runners

  363. The Spinning Women

  364. The Dutch Carpet

  365. Drawing Out the Intestines

  366. Zhang Hongjian

  367. The Imperial Physician

  368. The Flying Ox

  369. Wang Zi’an

  370. A Man Named Diao

  371. The Farmer’s Wife

  372. Yi from Jinling

  373. Guo An

  374. Solving the Cases

  375. The Faithful Dog

  376. Yang Dahong

  377. The Zhaya Mountain Cave

  378. Anqi’s Island

  379. Some Customs in Yuanjiang

  380. Princess Yunluo

  381. The Language of Birds

  382. The Heavenly Palace

  383. Qiao’s Daughter

  384. The Clam

  385. Lady Liu

  386. The Lingxian Fox

  387. Peddler Wang

  388. The Exhausted Dragons

  389. Scholar Zhen

  390. The Cloth Merchant

  391. Peng Erzheng

  392. Hexian

  393. Niu Tongren

  394. The God’s Daughter

  395. Xiangqun

  396. Three Incarnations

  397. Changting

  398. Xi Fangping

  399. Suqiu

  400. Jia Fengzhi

  401. Yanzhi

  402. A-Qian

  403. Ruiyun

  404. Qiu Daniang

  405. Cao Cao’s Tomb

  406. Grand Secretary Longfei

  407. Shanhu

  408. The Wutong Spirits

  409. Another Wutong Spirit

  410. The Shen Family

  411. Hengniang

  412. Gejin

  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. My colleague Zhang Zhenjun has also been a reliable critic and a great scholarly resource.

  I am particularly indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editor, Li Lin, who has painstakingly reviewed my pinyin transliterations and has offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text,
then, must fall solely to me.

  If you would like to receive copies of the pinyin 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.

  I am pleased once again to present the work of illustrators who have responded to Pu Songling’s stories with their own beautifully strange visions. I admire and treasure the results of their efforts.

  For raising the kinds of questions that are always useful for me to ponder, and for listening with genuine interest as I read each new translation aloud, I am indebted to Ran Rongming/Ramona Ralston. 我们共有酷 爱书籍。

  Introduction

  I. Pu Songling, Paranormal Investigator: The Author as Phenomenologist

  In May, 2011, I was filming the ice sheet still covering Lake Tianchi—a crater lake located in one of the peaks of Changbaishan, Jiling province, sharing a border with North Korea—a body of water that is reputedly the home of multiple large aquatic creatures, of mysterious origin and perhaps dubious existence. Suddenly, I heard a man about seventy feet from me point frantically and cry out, “There it is! Right there, there, there!” While I saw nothing as I looked down at the shadows in the ice, the phenomenologist in me recognized that my fellow observer had just had a conscious brush, however subjective and fleeting, with the paranormal.1

  Later that same summer, I witnessed others’ similar reactions to bronze artifacts of uncertain ritual or symbolic function at the archeological museums of Jinsha and Sanxingdui in Sichuan province, and to a nature preserve at Shennongjia, in Hubei province, that features a sector labeled “Bigfoot Habitat,” and keeps certain areas off-limits to visitors, in deference to the wild men, the yeren who supposedly dwell there. At Shennongjia, I also got to speak with Zhang Jinxing, who established a nature research center there some sixteen years ago for the express purpose of studying the yeren; he assured me that the yeren were most definitely not men. It was at sites like these, among a wide range of believers, of individuals craving encounters with the anomalies of nature and history, that I understood Pu Songling’s love for strange narratives, the zhiguai comprising this collection, expressed in the words concluding his autobiographical preface to the stories: “The only ones who truly know me are those spirits of the green woods and of the dark spaces we cannot pass!” (1:4).

  Pu Songling possessed a number of the resources associated with the profile of the serious investigator of paranormal phenomena: an “open mind, an insatiable curiosity; a tireless persistence” and “peers” to offer encouragement (Grad 159). Pu describes himself as someone who “love[s] searching for spirits” and who “delight[s] in hearing ghost stories,” who believes that “there may be stranger things among us” (1:2) than what are imagined in our most fantastic folktales and supernatural narratives. There are those investigators of the paranormal who find their examinations rewarding for their own sake, as a conscious departure from the physical restrictions of quotidian reality, and as a balancing of the creative with the rational, allowing such individuals “to live up to the demands of their left cerebral hemisphere but also to preserve the spontaneity and integrity of their innate right-hemispheric endowments” (Ehrenwald 43). Pu expresses this latter motive with the observation that “[m]y enthusiasm quickly gets away from me and sometimes my comments are out of control” (1:2), well aware that his passion for his subject matter may “provoke outbursts of laughter from circumspect individuals” (1:3). Fortunately for him, he benefited from his acquaintance with “men from all four corners of China who share my enthusiasm for the unusual and have sent me stories” (1:2).

  Paranormal research into evidence of survival after death, particularly in the transfer of individual personality traits or memories to another individual, a central facet of belief in reincarnation and past lives continuity, has even included birthmark data as such evidence (Braude 191-94). Pu tells us that just prior to his own birth, his father experienced a dream of “a sickly, frail Buddhist” with “salve spread over a coin-shaped circle in the middle of his chest,” and by the time he awoke, his son, Songling, had been born with precisely such a circular birthmark on his chest. Similarly frail and “constantly ill,” the boy came to realize that “my fate would not be unlike that monk’s,” concluding in later years, “mustn’t it be the case that the monk was my previous incarnation?” (1:3). His father’s dream, as prescient and portentous as most dreams recounted in Chinese literary and folkloric tradition, is simply the first dream narrative in his collection to propose a precognitive function that directly affects the experience of the living.

  In this volume, a sub-prefect has a dream in which a man summons him to the underworld in “The Emperor of the Eastern Mountains” (yue shen), and after he meets a doctor the next day who looks like the dream messenger, the sub-prefect dies before midnight. Pu’s postscript to the story notes the folk belief that the Hell King and the mountain’s deity have dispatched “male and female ghost servants into the mortal world, where they’ve become occult doctors acting as ‘messengers of the dead.’” An Ercheng, in “Shanhu,” dreams of his deceased father chastizing him for his corrupt behavior, and when he refuses to change his ways, the consequences of the underworld’s judgment against him is that both of his sons die.

  Whether they “presage good or bad luck,” dreams can be interpreted “as oracles” because they are “experiences of the soul” of a mortal; immortals, those who have transcended human limitations, “have no dreams, because they have no desires or wishes” (Eberhard 86). The implied gulf here, between those inhabiting the mortal world, and those who are no longer subject to its restrictions, sometimes leads to tragic misunderstanding of the implications of dream oracles.2 The magistrate of Licheng, in “The Yamen Runners” (zaoli), dreams that the city god asks him to recruit some laborers, and upon awakening takes a list of individuals who serve in his office, and ritually burns it at the city god’s temple—resulting in the deaths of the eight men named there. The meaning or emphasis of a particular dream’s images can also be misconstrued, as in the “The Flying Ox” (niu fei), where a dream about a mighty ox that had just been purchased flying away, leads its owner to fear losing it, and hence he sells it at a loss. His fortune seems to change, and he manages to capture a momentarily docile falcon, only to lose it and subsequently realize that this is what his dream presaged. In “Wang Zi’an,” a wish-fulfillment dream by the title’s scholar leads him to imagine receiving news of a cash gift and achievement of the highest designation in the imperial civil service system, only to embarrass himself in front of his wife and servants as he realizes it was just a dream. To keep a connection to the paranormal intact, however, Pu allows him to discover some physical evidence at the story’s conclusion that begs the question of whether it was really just a dream.

  The tales also address survival after death outside the realm of dreams, depicting mortal characters’ encounters with ghostly figures. Curiously, those interactions often reflect an underworld that is a “mirror of the temporal order,” in that it is organized as a Confucian bureaucracy/meritocracy (Sivin 254). Thus the ghostly title scholar of “Yu Qu’e,” reveals that a parallel system of civil service examinations exists in the underworld; and just as in the mortal world, it seems to be about the only way for a spirit to gain promotion in the underworld (outside of direct appointments by those in power—by spirit judges, or even the Hell King himself). In “Lady Liu” (liu furen), honest, hardworking scholar Lian is rewarded with a number of opportunities to improve his situation thanks to the title’s ghostly benefactress, and he returns her generosity with his own gift of a large, landscaped memorial. Mistakes, however, are made in the underworld’s bureaucracy just as they are in the mundane world. Hence the beheading of a soldier on the battlefield in “The Army in Liaoyang” (liaoyang jun) prompts an underworld accountant to bring documentation attesting that the soldier’s time to die has not yet arrived; to rectify the error, the soldier’s he
ad is rejoined to his body in a miraculous healing.

  When something goes wrong (for the living characters) in these spectral encounters, it’s generally attributable to the bad judgments and disingenuous actions of human beings, rather than of malignant spirits. Scholar Xu, hired to tutor the nephew of ghostly Shi Jingye, becomes close to Shi’s maidservant, the title character of “Ainu,” who is also a ghost. His concern for her leads him to reunite her spirit with her corpse, and she returns to life—until, while intoxicated, Xu forces Ainu to drink a bit of wine, and his unthinking action precipitates the immediate disintegration of her body. A-Da, the deceased eldest son of a wine seller in “Peddler Wang” (wang huolang), gets into trouble and summons his younger brother to come testify on his behalf in the court of the underworld.3 However, the matter is suddenly settled out of court, leaving the befuddled younger brother stranded, without traveling expenses to return home. Fortunately, there are also opportunities for character interactions with ghosts to yield positive results despite their mortal foibles. Second Brother Yan marries the title ghost in “Xiangqun,” and after interacting with another female ghost, Lingxian, dies as a consequence of his infidelity; however, he’s revived by the intervention of his deceased elder brother, but only after Second Brother has shown compassion for his ghostly nephew, A-Xiao. Tipsy scholar Dai changes his ways in “Grand Secretary Longfei” (longfei xianggong), resulting in his survival of both a murder attempt and his meeting with an eminent relative who’s achieved high standing in the spirit world.

  These examples of individual identity persisting after death have powerful resonance for a culture like Pu’s, where traditional belief posited two souls, the po (魄) or female/yin soul (senses, emotion), and the hun (魂) or male/yang soul (intellect, reason); the po endures until the buried body decays—unless it is improperly buried, and then it may survive as a restless, even malicious, ghost—while the hun ascends to heaven, where it survives “up to five generations or up to the time that no living family members feel any more connection to it” (McClelland 60). This pervasive cultural belief in the soul’s survival sometimes pairs in Pu’s fiction with the conflicts associated with daily life, producing a story like “Three Incarnations” (san sheng). A man who remembers three of his previous lives (as a district magistrate, as a large dog, and as a civil service examination official), experiences conflict in each of those past lives with the same individual (who is, respectively, a scholar, a little dog, and then a scholar again), until, in the course of his third incarnation, the younger man becomes the elder’s son-in-law, and their interpersonal strife is finally, permanently, resolved.