To travel through these stories is to cross a landscape of stunning beauty and terrific cruelty, where expectations are subverted, where moral certainties are shattered, where gorgeously wrought surfaces beguile at the same time that acts of incredible brutality horrify.
It is no wonder that Yu Hua’s stories caused a sensation when they first appeared in the 1980s. His work represents a sophisticated and often disturbing revolution in the Chinese literary tradition, reminiscent of the fiction of modernists like Kafka, Kawabata, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet, but drawing inspiration from several strains of traditional Chinese narrative as well.
This is the first collection of short fiction by Yu Hua to appear in English. It takes us on a haunting and harrowing journey from classical China through the Cultural Revolution and into the new era of economic reform, exploding along the way our preconceived notions of what Chinese literature and culture are all about in the 1990s.
That the concept and history of punishment should figure heavily in the artistic sensibility of a young Chinese writer who grew up during the Cultural Revolution is hardly surprising. The main characters in both the title story and in "1986" are scholars specializing in the history of punishment through the ages, and an ancient fortune teller in another story is said to have achieved near-immortality through the deaths of his first four children. Personality and feeling are almost secondary in Yu Hua's cruel world, a world dominated by numerology, prophecy, and the faceless power of the state.
