Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 2 Read online

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Strange Tales from Liaozhai

  Volume Two

  Pu Songling

  Translated and Annotated by

  Sidney L. Sondergard

  Illustrations by Matt Howarth, Spencer Logan, Christopher Peterson, Alexa Unser, et al.

  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 Matt Howarth … [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 978-0-89581-043-4 (vol. 2 : 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. Pu Songling as Literary Ethnographer: Collecting and Interpreting Strange Tales

  II. Justice After Death: Pu Songling and the Tradition of the Hell King

  The Tales

  84. Official Lu’s Daughter

  85. The Daoist Priest

  86. The Hu Clan

  87. Magic Tricks

  88. The Begging Monk

  89. Vanquishing Foxes

  90. The Hibernating Dragon

  91. Su the Immortal

  92. Li Boyan

  93. Huang the Ninth

  94. The Woman from Jinling

  95. Master Tang

  96. The Hell King

  97. Lian Suo

  98. Shan, the Daoist Priest

  99. Bai Yuyu

  100. The Yaksha Kingdom

  101. The Little Topknot

  102. The Monks from the West

  103. The Greedy Man

  104. Liancheng

  105. Scholar Huo

  106. Wang Shixiu

  107. Shang Sanguan

  108. Yu Jiang

  109. Xiao’er

  110. Gengniang

  111. Gong Mengbi

  112. The Myna Bird

  113. Liu Haishi

  114. An Official Notice to the Ghosts

  115. The Clay Demon

  116. A Farewell Dream

  117. A Brilliant Light

  118. The Foreign Monks

  119. The Fox Concubine

  120. The Administrator of Thunder

  121. The Gambling Charm

  122. A-Xia

  123. Li Sijian

  124. Grand Master of the Five Sheep Fleeces

  125. The Furry Fox

  126. Pianpian

  127. The Black Beast

  128. Yu De

  129. Military Officer Yang

  130. A Strange Melon

  131. Qingmei

  132. The Rakshas’ Sea Market

  133. Tian Qilang

  134. Giving Birth to a Dragon

  135. Bao Zhu

  136. Gongsun Jiuniang

  137. The Cricket

  138. Xiucai Liu

  139. The Flood

  140. A Certain Man in Zhucheng

  141 The Storehouse Supervisor

  142. The Imperial Censor in Fengdu

  143. The Eyeless Dragon

  144. The Fox’s Humor

  145. Raining Coins

  146. A Concubine Beats the Thieves

  147. Driving Out a Monster

  148. The Sisters Switch Marriages

  149. A Sequel to the Yellow Millet Dream

  150. The Dragon Heads for Water

  151. The Tiny Hunting Dog

  152. The Chess Ghost

  153. Fourteenth Daughter Xin

  154. The White Lotus Society Master

  155. A Pair of Lanterns

  156. Chasing the Ghost and Shooting at the Fox

  157. A Donkey Repays a Debt

  158. The Rolling Head

  159. The Ghosts Throw a Banquet

  160. Young Master Hu the Fourth

  161. Confidence Schemes

  162. The Frogs’ Song

  163. The Performing Mice

  164. The Earthen Scholar

  165. The Earth God’s Wife

  166. The Daoist from Jinan

  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 St. Lawrence University for the sabbatical leave that allowed me to prepare the present volume. I also wish to thank the Freeman Foundation for the generous grant support that enabled 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.

  I remain indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editor, Li Lin, of the Department of College English Studies, Anhui University, P.R.C., who has painst
akingly reviewed my pinyin transliterations and offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text, however, must fall solely to me.

  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.

  Once again I have solicited illustrations for some of the stories herein, continuing the tradition in popular Chinese editions of Pu Songling’s stories. In addition to Matt Howarth, Spencer Logan, Christopher Peterson, and Alexa Unser, mentioned on the title page, I also wish to acknowledge the art here of Ben Grant and Megan Williams, a continuation of their work from volume one. I admire and treasure the results of these artists’ 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. 你是我的日月.

  Introduction

  I. Pu Songling as Literary Ethnographer: Collecting and Interpreting Strange Tales

  When we think of the work of a curator (from the Latin infinitive, curare, to take care) as the responsibility for nurturing and superintending a particular resource, we commonly assume that the assignment of that duty must have come from outside the individual performing it. Such was my assumption when I spoke with a woman who was carrying out various maintenance tasks at a shrine to Ma Chao (c. 176-225 C.E.), one of the Five Tiger Generals celebrated in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, located near Hanzhong, in Shaanxi province. Although it houses the gravesite of General Ma, and features a statue of him that dates back to the Ming dynasty, the shrine itself and its surrounding grounds are modest, particularly when compared to the elaborate landscaping, architecture, and effigies associated with shrines dedicated to the veneration of more prominent figures, like Zhuge Liang and Liu Bei, from the same historical period and classical source. I asked the woman whether she was the shrine’s caretaker (zhaokan ren), and she explained that she simply visited every two or three weeks to tidy the grounds and leave offerings, since there wasn’t anyone specifically charged with the task. Her modesty prevented her from taking a caretaker’s credit for improving the shrine’s appearance; I’m sure that she would have been even more emphatic about minimizing her contribution if I had inquired whether she was a curator (guanzhang, with the implications of hierarchical superiority, like a director).

  This kind of modesty, the self-effacement that points to a sincere personal reverence, is also typical of Pu Songling (1640-1715), regarding the almost five hundred short stories that comprise his Strange Tales from Liaozhai (liaozhai zhi yi). Liaozhai, the “studio of leisure” or “studio of chit-chat,” is the humble nickname he gave his own writing studio, and even applied to himself. The moralizing addenda that he attaches to thirty of the stories in this volume are all prefaced yi shi shi, a stylistic homage to historiographer Sima Qian, and Pu’s way of identifying himself as the historian, or archivist, of the strange tales he presents. My choice of “collector” as the translation of his self-imposed title is a reflection of Pu’s insistence on portraying himself as the conduit for the stories, rather than as their composer or shaper. In the preface to the collection, he acknowledges that individuals from all over China “who share my enthusiasm for the unusual have sent me stories by post,” making no artistic claims for himself other than to say that “I have written down what I have heard, and this collection is the result.”1 Pu Songling’s grandson, Pu Lide (1683-1751), however, began to stress the point that the crafting of the collection was “an act of serious self-expression” (Zeitlin 27), while later authors like Zou Tao (fl. ca. 1884) helped to spread the descriptions of the thatched shed where Pu would solicit stories from travelers (Hammond 206-7) who stopped there in exchange for the tea he offered.

  In four of the eighty-three stories in this volume, Pu Songling actually claims to be quoting the words of specific persons: of a monk named Ti Kong (“The Foreign Monks” [fan seng]), and of officials Li Jingyi (“The Black Beast” [hei shou]) and Wang Zixun (“The Frogs’ Song” [wa qu] and “The Performing Mice” [shu xi]). Since he is an author and a collector of narratives from fellow citizens interested in the unusual and the supernatural, it’s intriguing to consider the implications of Pu functioning as a kind of ethnographer of this specific culture-sharing group. In ethnography, such groups are constituted by any multiplicity of individuals who share the same language, beliefs, and behaviors. Since the stories of which Pu claims to be merely the collector were necessarily subjected to his revision, elaboration, and other literary crafting (such as his personalized moral pronouncements) before he included them in Strange Tales from Liaozhai, they provide the reader with what ethnographers call etic data, or “information representing the ethnographer’s interpretation of the participant’s perspectives” (Creswell 491). Even the stories that Pu claims simply to have received from correspondents were at least reconfigured by the author, since he doesn’t cite them verbatim as he claims to be doing with the accounts from Ti Kong, Li Jingyi, and Wang Zixun.

  The degree of Pu Songling’s reinvention of the materials he collected is perhaps best measured by the pervasive themes in the stories. Karl S.Y. Kao has argued that the Chinese tradition of using weird fiction “to convey the orthodox values of social criticism” is adapted by Pu in his “depictions of imaginary worlds which amend for what is lacking in this world” (184,188). In general, the criticism he wishes to communicate seems to be of a cautionary nature. For every positive commendation he makes of individuals—as when he demonstrates his respect for upright officials by asserting in “An Official Notice to the Ghosts” (yu gui) that Minister Shi Maohua’s righteous representation of the people’s interests is what empowers him to intimidate some unruly spirits into ceasing their disruptive actions—he provides multiple examples of behaviors to be avoided. Corrupt and unjust officials who abuse their power come in for a significant share of Pu’s scorn, so Zhang Daoyi, the Commissioner of Education, receives a pain in the forehead for having stolen an image he coveted in “The Fox Concubine” (hu qie), while a magistrate who pressures those beneath him to fulfill his demands is reciprocally squeezed by parallel demands from those above him in “The Cricket” (cuzhi).

  But his stories also admonish readers to work more consciously to understand other people and their motives, possibly prompted by his own feelings of being misapprehended by others.2 People continually try to suggest better places for the title character of “The Begging Monk” (gai seng) to make his requests, pestering him until he finally takes drastic measures to escape their interference; in “Scholar Huo” (huo sheng), a man named Wang, from Pu’s hometown, learns the dangers of demeaning others; and in “Gong Mengbi” (gong mengbi), Liu He, a man too profligate with his generosity, is taught some valuable lessons in the need to judge character astutely and to trust the earnest advice of proven friends. Empathy for others is so important to Pu that he often makes a point of eliciting it from readers even for the supernatural denizens of his tales.

  Ethnographic researchers sometimes use the term “autoethnography” to signify a self-reflective examination by the individual who is collecting field data on a culture-sharing group. On these occasions, “ethnographers lapse into narrative accounts of their own lives to make a point,” explicitly intruding into “accounts purportedly devoted to portraying the lives of others” (Wolcott 174). The social and moral commentary addenda introduced by his formula phrase, “the collector of these strange tales remarks,” reveal the idiosyncrasy of Pu’s attitudes on a variety of subjects, though he also expresses personal reactions in passing references, sometimes introduced with the verbal equivalent of a deep sigh (as with the “Alas!” in “A Farewell Dream” [meng bie], “A-Xia” [a-xia], and “A Donkey Repays a Debt” [jian changzhai]). There are, as well, responses of affirmation or denunciation that he feels obliged to make to certain sto
ries while recognizing that they may appear to fall outside the boundary of decorum, and hence he doesn’t explicitly tag them as the formal remarks of “the collector of these strange tales.” The surprisingly wanton behavior of the spouse of Diaoqiao village’s earth god3 prompts Pu to castigate her for the residual damage she causes to the reputation of the village (in “The Earth God’s Wife” [tudi furen]). This may also explain why Pu prefaces the long harangue at the conclusion of “Huang the Ninth” (huang jiu lang) with the comment that “I’ll be a ‘judge in jest’ and render this judgment”: it is a reaction to the protagonist He Zixiao’s homosexual proclivity (though he proves to be bisexual in the course of the story), and is written in a self-consciously literary style, to allow for punning and erudite allusions while criticizing He’s sexual behavior. Interestingly, Pu doesn’t condemn He’s sexual interest in the title character because he thinks it’s inherently wrong, but because it is fruitless: “a man’s backside is barren ground, and nothing will grow there.”

  Providing readers with an accurate sense of the contexts surrounding the subjects of field studies is a central task of the ethnographer, requiring the data collector to work toward understanding the behavior, motives, values, and activities of the particular cultural groups under observation “from the members’ unique perspective.” To index the meanings of these areas validly requires “immersion in the rhythms, customs, and practices of the membership group” (Arrigo 74-5). On occasions, the ethnographer’s desire to engage in personal commentary on the culture-sharing groups being described intersects in Pu’s stories with evidence of his contact with their activities. Pu’s condemnation at the conclusion of “The Gambling Charm” (du fu), for example, is an autoethnographic intrusion on the author’s part into the story of a relative’s gambling addiction, as well as evidence of his having witnessed and considered the activity from the participants’ perspective. He evokes an image that combines both supernatural elements and human foibles to describe the fervor of dice playing: the frenzied shouting of the gamblers “when they toss the dice shows that they want to win the money so badly that they project their spirit into the very dice.”