STRANGE TALES FROM A.

CHINESE STUDIO.

PU SONGLING.

Acknowledgements.

I was fortunate to receive a generous grant from the Taiwan Council for Cultural Construction and Development when I began this project, back in 1991. Without that three-year period of freedom I would never have been able to begin my journey into this strange and wonderful world, and write the first drafts from which these versions are descended. I wish to express my gratitude to the head of the Council, Kuo Wei-fan, and to my friends Joseph Lau, William Tay, Wang Ch'iu-kuei and Anthony Yu, for their loyal support over the years. Mark Elvin kindly invited me to spend the third year of this project (1993) as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, and in Canberra Liu Ts'un-yan patiently answered several questions of mine. I am endebted once again to Richard Rigby, who sent me a copy from Japan of the invaluable Liaozhai Dictionary, compiled by Zhu Yixuan and his colleagues in 1991. Don Cohn gave me a beautiful old edition of the book, which he found in a bookshop in Tokyo. Andre Levy, whose complete French translation is soon to be published by Picquier, has shared his knowledge and enthusiasm with me over the years. In Hong Kong, in the 1990s, Tong Man patiently went along with many a meandering train of thought as we read these stories together. More recently I have benefited, as always, from the acute comments of Rachel May, and from the shrewd emendations of David Hawkes, both of whom read the final drafts of this book in their entirety.

At Penguin, I am grateful to Paul Keegan for having so enthusiastically welcomed this book into the Classics series many years ago, and to Laura Barber for having waited so stoically during the intervening years for it to come to fruition. Caroline Pretty has been a wonderfully perceptive and discreet copy-editor, rescuing me from many careless errors and lazy omissions. She has been at all times a sympathetic collaborator, never an intruder.

These translations are dedicated to Gunter and Barbara Wohlfart, dear friends, who shared good times 'in the green grove', and came when needed to 'the dark frontier'.

Introduction.

Pu Songling, the author of these extraordinary tales, was born in the summer of 1640, four years before the final collapse of the Ming dynasty (13681644) and the arrival in Peking of the Manchu conquerors from the north. He died in February 1715, towards the end of the long reign of the second Manchu Emperor, Kangxi, having spent almost his entire life in the mountainous north-eastern province of Shandong.1 His father was a well-to-do merchant from a village near the small town of Zichuan,2 and Pu Songling grew up here during the unsettled times of the dynastic transition, as the old order was falling apart and the conquerors were taking charge of their new domain the period referred to several times in these tales as the Troubles. Peasant rebellions and anti-Manchu uprisings erupted periodically in Shandong during his childhood, all of them brutally suppressed by the new rulers.

In the spring of 1658, by which time the dynasty was beginning to acquire a certain stability, Pu Songling sat for his first public examination and was placed first in all three stages of the highly competitive process. He was singled out for high praise by the eminent mandarin acting as Examiner, and looked set for a distinguished career as an official. But it was not to be. From 1660 onwards, every one of his many attempts at acquiring the vital second degree proved unsuccessful.3 As a result, from the age of nineteen to the age of seventy-two he was to be a perpetual student, locked into the 'examination hell' of the Chinese civil service recruitment system,4 supporting his family as a lowly private secretary and tutor in the households of one or another of the local wealthy families.

His failure as a mandarin was a source of deep personal disappointment, but it did at least leave him with ample leisure for reading and writing. Throughout his long life he wrote prolifically in a wide variety of literary genres: verse of all sorts, prose essays, practical reference works and handbooks, fiction, drama and ballads. It is, however, for his superb Strange Tales, on which he worked during most of his adult life, that he achieved immortality. While Cao Xueqin's Story of the Stone, that rambling and addictive novel of manners and sentiment, is regarded as the supreme novel written in the Chinese vernacular, the superb gallery of bizarre miniatures that constitute Strange Tales is seen as the pinnacle of fiction in the classical language.5 TRADITIONS.

Pu Songling was enormously well read (all those years of studying paid off), and deeply conscious of writing in two long literary traditions of storytelling, two distinct genres, that of the zhiguai, which we may call the Weird Account, and that of the chuanqi, the Strange Story. Both used the highly elliptical classical language, as opposed to the vernacular favoured by many writers of fiction and drama ever since the Southern Song dynasty (11271278), and both were part of the broader realm of 'casual' belles-lettres (what the Chinese call biji, 'jottings').6 A Weird Account might best be described as a pithy narrative of some strange event, a laconic record of some grotesque creature, of a haunting, a bizarre person, a peculiar phenomenon or coincidence. Here is a precursor of the genre, a strange little rudimentary myth, a fragment from The Book of Hills and Seas, one of the most ancient repositories of such things: Big Daddy chased the sun. As the sun went down he was thirsty and wanted a drink, so he drank from the Yellow and Wei rivers. They were not enough, so he started north to drink the Great Marsh, but on the way he died of thirst. He threw away his staff, and it became the Forest of Deng.7 Here is a later and more polished example, this time a thumbnail sketch of a much-loved drunkard and eccentric, from the wonderful fifth-century collection of cameos A New Account of Tales of the World: On many occasions, under the influence of wine, Liu Ling would be completely free and unrestrained, sometimes even removing his clothes and sitting stark naked in the middle of his room. Some people once saw him in this state and chided him for it. Ling retorted, 'Heaven and earth are my pillars and roof, the rooms of my house are my jacket and trousers. What are you gentlemen doing in my trousers?'8 This sort of thing has fascinated Chinese readers since the dawn of literature, and still does. The Chinese press, both in the Mainland and in Hong Kong, regularly carries accounts of odd phenomena, sometimes human, sometimes not. In August 2004, for example, the Hong Kong press provided a piquant description of a man discovered in a remote part of the Chinese countryside, whose entire body was densely covered in hair.9 The Strange Stories are more artistically polished than the Weird Accounts. They are short works of fiction with fully developed plots and characterization. Some are romantic, some fantastical, some semi-historical, others are concerned with the exploits of magicians or Martial Arts adepts. These stories were first written during the Tang dynasty (618907), more famous as a golden age for poetry, but the genre continued to be popular during the subsequent Song, Yuan (127913 68) and Ming dynasties.10 Pu Songling brought these two traditions together in his Strange Tales, an achievement for which he has sometimes been criticized by purist literary critics. On the one hand we find in his collection longer stories with complex plots, often involving relationships between men, fox-spirits and ghosts, sometimes interweaving the events of several incarnations.11 Then there are a large number of medium-length tales dealing with a variety of themes: the foibles of spiritual or alchemical pretension, both Buddhist and Taoist; the workings of illusion and enlightenment; and the ways of human vanity and corruption in general.12 These are interspersed with brief accounts of strange phenomena (earthquakes, hail-storms, mirages), of unusual abilities, pranks and preoccupations (rare sorts of kungfu, mediumistic skills genuine or otherwise strange performances with animals, obsessions with snakes); descriptions of unusual varieties of bird, fish, turtle and alligator, of magical stones, bags and swords; and tantalizing evocations of the transience of life, of strange tenants and abandoned halls. Pu Songling's collection ranges in style and form, as Anthony Yu writes, 'from gossipy anecdotes and ethnography-like fragments to polished compositions of exquisite language and superb control.'13 I firmly believe that the richly heterogeneous nature of this book (to which I have tried to be faithful in this selection) was deliberate on the author's part. As we read we are offered the varied courses of a Chinese banquet. We are constantly being surprised and delighted, and yet nothing is there in excess. Pu Songling enjoyed breaking the rules, and he exploited to excellent effect the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, presenting his readers with, in the words of Andre Levy, a 'full range of inconsistencies while at the same time providing a subtle, inimitable and elusive unity'.14 A CHINESE STORYTELLER'S STUDIO: SOURCES AND ALLUSION, HUMOUR AND MELANCHOLY.

I recommend Pu Songling's own Preface (pp. 45367) as by far the best guide to his sources, to his lineage as a writer and to his methods as a storyteller: Of tales told I have made a book.

With time And my love of hoarding, The matter sent me by friends From the four corners Has grown into a pile.

A totally unreliable but nonetheless charming legend has our author collecting tales at the roadside, offering casual passers-by cups of tea and pipes of tobacco in exchange for strange or unusual anecdotes.15 Scholars continue to debate to what extent his finished tales incorporate such 'popular' material. Certainly he received materials from others, but there is little to suggest that any of them were illiterate old women dropping by for a cup of tea. As we have just seen in his Preface, he thanks his far-flung friends for helping him, by sending him raw material which he then worked up into tales. In no less than seventeen of the stories in the present selection he names such sources. In eleven others historical people are mentioned in the story itself, and in at least six cases verifiable historical events are referred to. In Tale 12, 'Stealing a Peach', Pu Songling states clearly that the story is based on something he witnessed himself as a youth. After all, as he observes in his Preface, real experience can be stranger than mythology and fantasy: Here in the civilized world, Stranger events by far occur Than in the Country of Cropped Hair; Before our very eyes Weirder tales unfold Than in the Nation of Flying Heads.

Three tales (again from the present selection) are in some way related to his own family, and seven have some connection with his home town of Zichuan. Pu Songling also reworked stories that had been around for centuries. Examples of this are Tale 13, 'Growing Pears', based on a far shorter item from Gan Bao's fourth-century In Search of Spirits, and Tale 82, 'Princess Lotus', derived from two famous full-length Tang-dynasty tales.16 And last but not least, in many cases he undoubtedly exercised his own fertile imagination. He was a creative artist. To quote his Preface once more: My irrepressible transports Are an unfettered rapture That cannot be gainsaid; My far-soaring ideas, An unbridled folly That cannot be denied.

So we are dealing with a collection of tales of diverse types, of diverse lengths, of diverse origins, and on equally diverse themes. But this diversity is brilliantly unified by a distinctive brand of lyricism and humour, and by a transcendent literary style. The French scholar and translator Jacques Dars has given a fine description of Pu Songling's art: His tales are constructed and developed with consummate art, the episodes, transitions and surprises are cleverly handled, the descriptions lively, full of unexpected details. The depiction of character and the twists and turns in the plot testify to a rare imagination. The fantastic predominates, but it never wearies the reader, because here too the author knows how to vary his themes, his adventures, his tone, his style. It is to be noted too that despite his magisterial use of the classical language, which is that of a supreme master of Chinese, he enlivens his tales with a judicious admixture of popular expressions and well-turned idioms, which render the finished product less abstruse and add considerably to its charm. Over and above the exquisite formal beauty of the tales and the author's never-failing felicity of expression, there is a wonderful sense of proportion in the disposal of the elements within the whole, an overriding art such as one finds in the most beautiful Chinese jades: they are so perfectly carved and polished that one can caress them with one's eyes and gaze at them for ever in sheer wonder.17 These are the qualities that set Pu Songling apart from the many other tellers of strange tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Let us consider his prose style first. It needs to be stressed for readers of these translations that Pu Songling's original language is somewhat daunting. Many a Chinese reader today has a hard time making sense of it. Pu Songling was writing not for the masses but for his fellow scholar-gentlemen, in their secluded libraries or studios.18 He could have chosen to write in the vernacular, but he did not. His prose is extraordinarily elegant and extremely demanding. The twentieth-century essayist Lu Xun, himself master of a crabbed semi-antique prose style, once protested that Pu Songling used 'so many classical allusions that ordinary readers find the language rather difficult'.19 In that sense the Tales are unashamedly highbrow.

But despite their apparent (and at first sight off-putting) linguistic complexity, the Tales are never pedantic. On the contrary, one of their attractions for the Chinese connoisseur is the lightness, and occasional disrespect, with which the author wears his learning. Often he uses allusion as a straightforward embellishment, a literary patina to the text. But sometimes he will stand an allusion on its head and twist references, subversively recycling the very material he had been obliged to memorize and digest in his lifelong studies. Let me give one example. In Tale 38, 'Fox Enchantment', the young man, who is about to climb into bed with the fox-girl, recoils in terror upon feeling her 'long bushy tail', and when she asks him what the trouble is, he replies, 'It wasn't your face... It was your tail.' This phrase is one of countless throwaway allusions in the Tales, the force and humour of which are utterly lost in translation. The original expression (about 'face' and 'tail') occurs in the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, a venerable classic that Pu Songling (and every other Chinese scholar) would have studied and memorized extensively for his examinations. Lu Zhan'en, in his 1825 Tales commentary, gives the exact wording in the original Zuo Commentary text: 'There is a saying of the ancients: "Fearing for its head and fearing for its tail, there is little of the body left [not to fear for]."'20 As two other commentators, He Shouqi (1823) and Dan Minglun (1842), point out, the author is teasing his readers by playing with the classic text, giving it a mischievous twist.21 Pu Songling has, as he wrote in a poem, 'An idle jest to share'.22 It is a little as if John Cleland were to have put a well-known line from Genesis into the mouth of a young rake in the middle of a seduction scene in Fanny Hill. Pu Songling's fellow literati, for whom he was writing, would all have understood. But for the translator this sort of 'scholar's studio' jeu d'esprit poses almost insuperable problems.23 Ambivalence and wordplay, mellow humour coupled with an irrepressible delight in the strange for its own sake, are what give the book its personal flavour, its uniquely wry and understated charm. It is a most individual voice. It is, as Pu Songling suggests in his Preface, 'music that is what it is for reasons of its own'. Pu Songling is essentially a playful author, playful in his vision of the human condition, playful in the way he uses language and tells his stories.24 In this he resembles Zhuangzi, the great Taoist philosopher and raconteur of the fourth century BC. And like Zhuangzi, he enlightens as he entertains, pushing at the boundaries of our everyday experience, stretching our vision in the tiniest of ways: a leaf blown across a doorway, the trail of an insect as it makes its way across a page. These things too are extraordinary, they can open up new vistas of thought, help us to see things anew, quicken strange intuitions.

Side by side with the humour, an unmistakable note of melancholy creeps in now and then. Once again, the Preface speaks movingly of how the author has poured his soul, his spleen and anguish, into his work: Midnight finds me Here in this desolate studio By the dim light Of my flickering lamp, Fashioning my tales At this ice-cold table, Vainly piecing together my sequel To The Infernal Regions.

I drink to propel my pen, But succeed only in venting My spleen, My lonely anguish.

Is it not a sad thing, To find expression thus?

Alas! I am but A bird Trembling at the winter frost, Vainly seeking shelter in the tree; An insect Crying at the autumn moon, Feebly hugging the door for warmth.

Those who know me Are in the green grove, They are At the dark frontier.

All of these elements, the elegant diction, the subtle humour, the pervasive melancholy, constitute the magic, what the Chinese call the quwei or 'flavour', of Pu Songling's work. It is a magic sadly absent from the many versions of the Tales retold in modern vernacular Chinese. The modern language is ill-equipped to evoke the peculiar ambience of the scholar-gentleman's world, the world of the traditional 'Chinese studio' (zhai), from which these tales emanate.

This 'studio world' was a very special space. It was a physical space, a pavilion set apart in the garden, screened perhaps by bamboos, a place of seclusion and privilege, where the literati could elaborate their fantasies, surrounded with their favourite knick-knacks (strangely carved inkstones, armrests for calligraphy, paperweights, brushes, seals, incense burners, weird roots and rocks, etc.). It is in just such a space as this that many of the experiences and encounters of Strange Tales take place. But the 'studio' was more than this: it was also a symbolic space, a gestalt. It denoted a whole cultural, spiritual, aesthetic and sensual world. Chinese writers and artists often encoded their own personal sense of identity in a 'studio name'. (Indeed they often had studio names without having an actual studio.) For example, the celebrated painter and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu (12541322) named his studio 'Pinetrees in the Snow'. Pu Songling's own studio name, liao, is virtually untranslatable. It contains several differing and yet interconnected senses: leisure, time on one's hands, a passing enthusiasm or whim, something ephemeral, chit-chat, a desolate feeling of helplessness or inadequacy. It also happens to be the ancient name for a place in Pu Songling's native province of Shandong. The little word is both nothing and everything. It is a mere trifle, a passing whim, but a trifle and a whim charged with poignant meaning. The studio that bears this name exists now as a collection of tales, a receptacle fashioned in the crucible of Pu Songling's imagination, a timeless prism affording a view into the inner world of the traditional Chinese scholar-gentleman.

THE EROTIC.

These tales have also been prized (and sometimes frowned upon) for their discreetly and deliciously erotic flavour. The late-Ming period was noted for its voluminous production of pornographic and erotic fiction, designed for the tastes of the prosperous urban bourgeoisie of the Yangtze region. Pu Songling was catering for a mellower and more refined audience. His readers were not looking for the blow-by-blow accounts of sexual marathons that fill the pages of a crude late-Ming work such as The Embroidered Couch, nor were they looking for the subtler and more extended explorations of sexual mores to be found in higher-class novels such as Golden Lotus or The Carnal Prayer Mat.25 That is not to say that his readers were genteel or prudish. On the contrary, they would have found their tastes well catered for by the strangely matter-of-fact manner in which sexuality is presented in Strange Tales. It is encountered quite explicitly, without prudery and without surprise, as part of everyday life. In a typical tale, a woman drifts into the studio of a young gentleman of leisure. Perhaps she is a local sing-song girl, or she may be a wife or concubine running away from an unhappy marriage. She may be a fox-spirit, or a ghost. The young man finds her extraordinarily beautiful, undresses her, and without delay they go to bed and make love. Then the story unfolds. Sex for Pu Songling is simply one arena in which human behaviour can be observed in its extraordinary intensity, richness and variety. It is intriguing insofar as it reveals human nature. Strange Tales is (among other things) a casebook of Chinese sexual pathology. A lonely woman, left too often alone at home by her merchant husband, couples with her dog. A young man with a roving eye is deluded by his neighbour's pretty wife into having sex with a rotten log and as a result has his penis fatally bitten by a scorpion. Another young man's impotence is miraculously cured by the administration of a large herbal bolus. A kungfu master bashes his penis with a mallet and feels no pain. We encounter aphrodisiacs, love potions and dildos. A troublesome fox-spirit is exterminated through more than usually vigorous and prolonged sexual intercourse. Extreme pain is inflicted on an innocent woman by the overly large sexual member of a visiting Wutong-spirit. Above all, again and again, we read of the seduction of an enervated young scholar by some fatally attractive woman-as-fox or woman-as-ghost, their sexual liaison leading to his eventual debilitation and premature death.

FOX-SPIRITS.

The fox-spirit or hulijing has haunted the Chinese male imagination for centuries. When we read these stories today, what are we to make of them, these shape-shifting, irresistibly beautiful 'were-vixen'? What did they mean for Pu Songling? One moment they are sensual, seductive women, the next they are lying on the ground, no more than an animal pelt. They can be destructive and heartless, ruthless and vindictive. They can suck the life out of their young men, causing them to ejaculate to excess and robbing them of their precious Yang essence. They are seen as feeding on their victims, while prolonging their own span of life.26 Such is the caricature of the fox-spirit. But they can also (especially in these tales) be tender and vulnerable, and capable of deep love and loyalty. For Pu Songling, the fox-spirit is a projection of the deeply ambivalent attitude of the Chinese male literati towards their women and towards the demands of physical and emotional love. He returns to this theme again and again. The power of feminine beauty and sexuality, the power of the Yin, as personified in the fox-spirit, inspires men and simultaneously incapacitates them, instilling in them a lethal mixture of infatuation, fascination and fear. It is above all the fear, the fear of being dominated in this way, that leads to the male response, to what Robert van Gulik has called the 'male sexual vampirism conducted under the guise of the so-called Taoist techniques of the bedchamber'. In this warlike scheme of things, man regards woman as the 'enemy' because by causing him to emit semen she 'robs' him of his precious Yang essence. 'A woman who has learned this secret [of nursing her own potency by absorbing the man's Yang] will feed on her copulations with men, so that she will prolong her span of life and not grow old, but always remain like a young girl.'27 Men respond by evolving self-aggrandizing Taoist pseudo-alchemical sexual practices in effect to protect themselves against this threat, against the sexual predations of their women (fox-spirits). They are exorcizing their own fear. The same fear and the same need for sexual protection led to the extreme subjugation of women, to the openly sadistic practice of female mutilation known euphemistically as 'foot-binding'.28 But why did the fox take on these attributes, rather than any other animal? Van Gulik attributes the 'special sexual associations' of the fox-spirit to, first, 'the ancient belief in the [creature's] abundant vital essence', and second, to 'its proclivity to play pranks on man'. But I cannot help thinking that it is a lot simpler and more physical than this. The fox-spirit seems to me a powerful physical shorthand for feminine sexuality, for the woman's sex organs, for the object of male desire. To return to the example I have quoted above, from Tale 38, 'Fox Enchantment': 'Then he began to caress her and fondle her body, allowing his hand to stray to her nether regions, where to his great alarm he encountered a long bushy tail.' In a number of cases, fox-spirits are male, but then it is merely an extension of the same principle. They still represent the power of sexuality. One of the most striking male fox-spirits is the beautiful boy Huang, in the moving tale 'Cut Sleeve' (Tale 63). Huang, having been at first the reluctant object of the obsessive sexual attentions of He Shican, ends up demonstrating his own genuine affection by using his physical attractions to right an injustice done to his lover in another lifetime.

In his observations on the 'Chinese fox', the British consular official Thomas Watters was in many ways ahead of his time. 'Sometimes,' he observed in 1874, 'a man marries what he thinks is a fine pretty woman, but finds that she is a genuine fox an experience I believe scarcely confined to China... The poor unhappy prostitutes of Fuzhou and other places pray to this demon to give them favour in the eyes of men.'29 Watters also quotes (with some reservations) the following passage from a work entitled Zoological Mythology by one Professor De Gubernatis (who was writing in a Western, not Chinese, context): The fox is the reddish mediatrix between the luminous day and the gloomy night, the crepuscular phenomenon of the heavens taking an animal form. No form seemed more adapted to the purpose than that of the fox or the jackal, on account of their colour and some of their cunning habits. The hour of twilight is the time of uncertainties and deceits.

Watters himself testifies to the widespread fear of fox-spirits in Fujian Province, and to the tendency to blame them for all sorts of physical and psychic troubles: In several parts of Fujian, and in other places, vertigo, madness, melancholy, and other bodily and mental derangements, are ascribed to the action of this creature, in its capacity of sprite, or spiritual being, tormenting mankind... It is generally invisible to all, except the person afflicted, though occasionally it is seen by some friend or professional exorcist.

This sounds very much like Pu Songling writing, and Watters goes on to tell (from firsthand sources of his own) a number of fox stories worthy of Strange Tales, which for us have the added interest of being told (not translated): A countryman from a village in the neighbourhood of Fuzhou told me a few months ago of a relative whose son had been afflicted by this demon. The boy was pale and thin, and always unhappy: he did not care for his food or drink, and he enjoyed no amusement. His mother became distressed, seeing her darling child thus pining away miserably, and she called in a Taoist priest of local celebrity. The priest heard the child in his sleep cry out as if in fear of the fox, and he at once prescribed the usual remedy for possession by the [female fox-]elf. This is simply a charm called the Tian-si-fu and consists of a mystical character written by Zhang Tianshi, the hereditary head of the Taoists. One morning he brought the charm into the room where the mother and son were sitting, and at once proceeded to paste it up on the wall. At the very instant the charm was displayed the afflicted boy cried out: 'There goes the fox catch him!' His eyes seemed to follow a form running out through the door and away to the hills, but he recovered his health and spirits and is now quite well.

GHOSTS AND THE SUPERNATURAL.

Strange Tales is often referred to in Chinese as 'Tales of Foxes and Ghosts'. What of the ghosts in these pages? Relatively few of the tales selected here correspond to what we think of as spine-chilling stories of ghosts and the supernatural. We can point to Tale 3, 'Living Dead', Tale 4, 'Spitting Water', Tale 7, 'The Troll', and Tale 8, 'Biting a Ghost'. More usually, the ghosts are female revenants, exercising an attraction no less fatal than that of the fox-spirits and yet often capable of great love, as well as being deeply versed in the Arts of the Bedchamber. To quote van Gulik once more: Sexual intercourse with a ghost was considered to be a source of extraordinary pleasure, and at the same time usually fatal. The Elected Girl asked: 'How do incubi originate?' To which [the ancient] Pengzu answered: 'If a person has an unbalanced sex life, his sexual desire will increase. Devils and goblins take advantage of this condition. They assume human shape and have sexual intercourse with such a person. They are much more skilled in this than human beings, so much so that their victim becomes completely enamoured of the ghostly lover. These persons will keep the relation secret and will not speak about its delights. In the end they will succumb alone, without anyone being the wiser. During sexual intercourse with such an incubus one will experience a pleasure that is greater than ever felt while copulating with an ordinary human being. But at the same time one will become subject to this disease which is difficult to cure.30 In Tale 54, 'Lotus Fragrance', the author gives us a lengthy description of a love triangle involving a young man, a fox-spirit and a ghost. In a series of almost metaphysical dialogues, the two female characters explore the workings of love 'between the species'. After an initial period of intense rivalry, the two of them, the fox-spirit Lotus Fragrance, and the ghost girl Li, become as devoted to each other as one can imagine a principal wife and a concubine might have been in a harmonious polygamous household. The reader is left at the end of the story with a powerful feeling of having glimpsed the inner workings of a characteristically Chinese domestic triangle. We are talking here, as so often in Strange Tales, not so much about strange supernatural entities as about subtle levels of human interaction. Many tales deal explicitly and powerfully with relationships between the sexes, with demons and psychic forces. Fox and ghost portray in striking symbolic terms the life-and-death struggle of the sexes, in which practices such as foot-binding and the Taoist 'coitus thesauratus', the obsessive practice of semen-retention, had evolved.

Often these tales are referred to as 'Tales of the Supernatural', and in a sense they are, in that they deal with the entire range of the Strange, stretching right across the spectrum of nature and supernature. In traditional Chinese thinking the boundary between 'this' world and the world 'beyond' is far more elastic than it is for Western readers today. I have always liked the philosopher-theologian Martin Buber's words in this context: The spirits who come to woo or to take possession of mortals are not Incubi and Succubi surrounded by the vaguely terrifying aura of the other world, but beings of our own experience, only born into a deeper, darker plane of existence. [This is] natural magic operating in a familiar world. The order of Nature is not broken, its perceptible limits merely extend; the abundant flow of the life force is nowhere arrested, and all that lives bears the seed of the spirit.31 HOW TO READ STRANGE TALES.

One of the best guides to reading Strange Tales remains the early-nineteenth-century commentator Feng Zhenluan. His words evoke perfectly the atmosphere of the scholar-gentleman's studio, the leisurely and culturally saturated ambience in which the tales were written, and in which Feng read them and wrote his commentary. A few of his jottings may serve to give an idea of this: 1. When wind and snow fill the sky and my fire has grown cold, my page-boy relights the coals and heats my wine. I dust my desk and turn up the wick of my lamp. When I come across a passage that catches my fancy, I quickly dash off a few lines.

2. Read these tales properly, and they will make you strong and brave; read them in the wrong way, and they will possess you. Cling to the details, and they will possess you; grasp the spirit, and you will be strong.

Appreciate the wonders of the style, see into the author's subtle intentions, grasp the human qualities of his characters and value his thoughts; then this book will be a unique guide to you in your own inner development. It will transform your character, and purify your heart.

3. All my life I have enjoyed reading the Records of the Grand Historian and the History of the Han Dynasty. But only the Strange Tales dispel oppression. After meals, after wine, after dreaming, in rainy weather and in sunshine, after a conversation with good friends, upon returning from a distant journey, I may toss off a few comments. These merely reflect my personal feelings, and are never intended as serious commentary.

4. If one reads the Strange Tales just for the plot, and not for the style, one is a fool.

5. A man eager to climb famous mountains must have the patience to follow a winding path. A man eager to eat bear's paw must have the patience to simmer it slowly. A man eager to watch the moonlight must have the patience to wait until midnight. A man eager to see a beautiful woman must have the patience to let her finish her toilette. Reading requires patience too.

6. This book should be read as one reads the Zuo Commentary. The Zuo is huge, the Strange Tales are miniatures. Every narrative skill is there. Every description is perfect. It is a series of huge miniatures.

This book should be read as one reads the Book of Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi is wild and abstract, the Strange Tales are dense and detailed. Although they treat of ghosts and foxes, the details make it very concrete and real. It is a series of wild details and concrete abstractions.

This book should be read as one reads the Records of the Grand Historian. The Records are bold and striking, the Strange Tales are dark and understated. One enters this book with a lantern, in the shadows of night. One comes out of it into the daylight, under a blue sky. Its few words evoke mighty landscapes and create magical realms. It is both bold and dark. It is both striking and understated.

This book should be read as one reads the Epigrams of the neo-Confucian philosophers. In the Epigrams the sense is pure; in the Strange Tales the sensibility is well tuned. Every time one thinks a situation weird, it is in fact very real and true to human nature. It contains both pure sense and pure sensibility.32 I have tried to heed Feng's advice. But the more I have grown to love these tales myself, the more I have become aware of the limitations of my versions. Despite their shortcomings I still like to think of them as 'a pleasure to share with a few like-minded friends, to help the wine down after a meal or to while away the solitude of a rainy evening by a lamplit window...'.33

NOTES.

1. Jaroslav Prusek, Pu Songling's Czech translator, has evoked the Shandong landscape well: Fantastically wild mountain ranges rise straight from the plain, especially the Taishan massif, the holy mountain of the East, its gulleys thick with age-old cypresses and with coloured monasteries here and there on its sides; the capital of the province, Jinan, is famed for its great springs bursting from the ground like fountains and forming clear lakes in which the wooded hill-tops round the town are mirrored. It could even be said that Shandong is one of the most bizarre parts of China, the wild cliffs of the half-circle of mountains drop sheer to the sea...

From 'P'u Sung-ling and His Work', in Chinese History and Literature (Prague, 1970), pp. 11112 (translated from the Preface to his 1962 anthology of Liaozhai translations).

2. Some scholars have argued that the Pu family may originally have been of either Arab or Turco-Mongolian origin, but certainly by the seventeenth century they seem to have become completely Chinese.

3. An apocryphal story attributes this repeated failure of his to a secret plot by fox-spirits and ghosts, anxious that official success might prevent him from immortalizing their exploits in writing. See Marlon K. Hom, The Continuation of Tradition, Ph.D. dissertation (University of Washington, 1979), p. 22.

4. The expression is taken from Ichisada Miyazaki's China's Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China (New Haven, 1981).

5. The authors of both works struggled in life and died in poverty and obscurity. (Cao Xueqin is thought to have been born in 1715, the year Pu Songling died.) Both of their creations circulated at first in handwritten form, passing from one aficionado to another. And neither book was published until well after the author's death. The Story of the Stone, left unfinished by Cao Xueqin at his death in 1765, was completed and published in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Strange Tales was first printed in 1766, more than fifty years after the death of Pu Songling. It has a textual history almost as intricate as that of the Stone, which is well summarized by Allan Barr in his 1984 article 'The Textual Transmission of Liaozhai zhiyi', Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44:2. For the Stone, see Cao Xueqin and Gao E, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes and John Minford, 5 vols. (Harmondsworth, 197386).

6. This vast domain of Chinese letters, neglected by translators, and largely unknown to Western readers, has always been troublesome for historians of literature, precisely because it defies clear categorization. Apart from countless collections of short fiction, biji literature includes miscellaneous collections of memoirs, personal journals, contemplative essays, observations of nature and society, informal historical and antiquarian jottings and anecdotes, random philosophical musings, jokes and humorous sketches, geographical and epigraphic notes and many other things besides. The only things that bind it together as a literary genre are that it was always written in the classical language and it was one of the favourite modes of self-expression of the traditional scholar-gentleman. It is a vast repository of the intimate outpourings of the Chinese literati through the ages.

7. John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (eds.), Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York and Hong Kong, 2000), I, p. 47. The Ming-dynasty critic Hu Yinglin described The Book of Hills and Seas (ed. Liu Xin (c. 50 BCAD 23)) as the 'ancestor of ancient and modern works that discuss the strange'.

8. Adapted from Richard Mather's translation in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, p. 669.

9. For further examples of these Weird Accounts, see Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 35981 and 65174.

10. Two of the most famous stories of this sort are 'A Lifetime in a Dream' by Li Gongzuo (c. 770c. 848) and 'The World in a Pillow' by Shen Jiji (c. 740c. 800), both of which lie behind Pu Songling's Tale 82, 'Princess Lotus'. For a selection of these stories from the Tang dynasty, see Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 102076. For a selection from later dynasties, see Wolfgang Bauer and Herbert Franke (trans.), The Golden Casket (Harmondsworth, 1965).

11. See for example Tale 40, 'The Laughing Girl', Tale 41, 'The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag', Tale 54, 'Lotus Fragrance', and Tale 69, 'Butterfly'.

12. See for example Tale 1, 'Homunculus', Tale 13, 'Growing Pears', and Tale 14, 'The Taoist Priest of Mount Lao'.

13. Anthony Yu, '"Rest, Rest Perturbed Spirit!": Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Fiction', Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48:2 (December 1987).

14. Andre Levy (trans.), Chroniques de l'etrange (Arles, 1996), p. 16.

15. Hom, The Continuation of Tradition, p. 23.

16. Altogether some thirty-seven of the 104 tales in this selection have precedents in the voluminous Chinese literature of fiction. See Zhu Yixuan, Liaozhai zhiyi ziliao huibian (Henan, 1986).

17. My translation from Jacques Dars and Chan Hingho, Comment lire un roman Chinois (Arles, 2001), pp. 1978.

18. This has not prevented many of the tales from becoming enormously popular in easier retellings, or in ballad, stage and screen versions.

19. Lu Xun, A History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi (Peking, 1976), p. 411.

20. Duke Wen 17th Year, in The Chinese Classics, trans. James Legge, 5 vols. (Hong Kong, 186172), V, p. 278. For the Zuo Commentary, see Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, pp. 16577.

21. Both of these commentators are included in Zhang Youhe (ed.), Liaozhai zhiyi huijiao huizhu huiping ben (Beijing, 1962).

22. See the exchange between Pu and Wang Shizhen, translated in full in my commentary to Pu's Preface.

23. For a hilarious example of Pu Songling having fun with a Zuo Commentary allusion, see the Jesting Judgement at the end of Tale 63, 'Cut Sleeve'.

24. For this playfulness, see for example Dan Minglun's comments on Tale 54, 'Lotus Fragrance'.

25. See Lu Tiancheng, attrib., The Embroidered Couch, trans. Lenny Hu (Vancouver, 2001). For Golden Lotus, there is the existing four-volume edition by Clement Egerton, Golden Lotus (London, 1939), and the ongoing (two volumes so far) work of David Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase (Princeton, 1993). For The Carnal Prayer Mat (attributed to Li Yu in the latter half of the seventeenth century), see Patrick Hanan (trans.), The Carnal Prayer Mat (New York, 1991).

26. See Robert van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Tokyo, 1951), pp. 11 and 70.

27. Van Gulik, ibid.

28. See my introductory note to the Tang-dynasty tale 'Miss Ren', one of the earliest fox-tales, in Minford and Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, I, p. 1024. Of course, foot-binding was not considered 'strange' by Pu Songling; in his day it was an almost universally accepted practice.

29. Thomas Watters, 'Chinese Fox-Myths', Journal of the North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society VIII (1874). Watters as a junior consular official had 'caused a stir in the British community by saying that he knew some Chinese whose word he would prefer to an Englishman's oath' (P. D. Coates, The China Consuls (Hong Kong, 1988), p. 213).

30. Van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints, pp. 612.

31. From the introduction to Martin Buber, Chinesische Geister und Liebesgeschichten (Frankfurt, 1927), trans. into English by Alex Page, Chinese Tales (New Jersey, 1991). It was these German adaptations that so impressed Kafka. In a letter to his fiancee Felice Bauer dated 16 January 1913 he describes them as 'pracht-voll'. See Briefe an Felice (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 252.

32. My translation of Feng Zhenluan, 'Du Liaozhai zashuo', in Liaozhai zhiyi huijiao huizhu huiping ben, ed. Zhang Youhe, pp. 918.

33. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, V, p. 375.

Note on the Text, Translation and Illustrations.

I began making these translations in the summer of 1991, in a dark cellar in the remote French mountain-village of Vingrau, by the light of a single bulb and with a large spider suspended above my head. The rugged range of the Corbieres, into which Ezra Pound gazed from Quillan on his 1912 walking tour, remarking in his journal, 'Above Quillan the road leads into Chinese unreality',1 is as strange a region in its own way as Shandong. Working on these tales has been inseparable from those mountains, and from the lonely spirit of the garrigue surrounding my studio at Fontmarty.

It will be evident to some readers that I owe a debt to Herbert Giles.2 I first encountered these tales in his much reprinted late-Victorian versions, which have been retranslated into several languages, and have represented Pu Songling in the West for well over a century. In entitling this selection Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, I am consciously paying homage to Giles and his Strange Stories, which I have always admired, even though a close reading of Giles's work certainly reveals the limitations of the taste of his time, which dictated what he thought he could permissibly do: I had originally determined to publish a full and complete translation of the whole of these sixteen volumes; but on a closer acquaintance many of the stories turned out to be quite unsuitable for the age in which we live, forcibly recalling the coarseness of our own writers of fiction in the eighteenth century. Others, again, were utterly pointless.3 One example will illustrate the ludicrous situation Giles found himself in, and in which he placed his reader. In Tale 6, 'The Painted Wall', the Provincial Graduate Zhu, who has been transported into the fairy realm of the temple mural, finds himself alone in the presence of the 'maiden with unbound hair'. '[W]ith no delay he embraced her and, finding her to be far from unreceptive, proceeded to make love to her.' This simple sexual encounter Giles transmogrifies into a formal wedding scene: 'Then they fell on their knees and worshipped heaven and earth together, and rose up as man and wife.' To this omission/interpolation Giles appends a footnote on Chinese wedding rites, a piece of pseudo-scholarship to authenticate his tampering with the text. His Strange Stories are filled with such things. But whatever his qualms about the content, Giles certainly appreciated 'the marvellously beautiful style of this gifted writer', and he brought a fine prose style of his own to the task of translation. I have not hesitated to borrow the occasional felicitous phrase of his.4 In my own translation I have decided not to use the many alternative names (literary sobriquets and flowery nicknames) which are often supplied by our Chinese author. For old-fashioned Chinese readers these were customary, in fact they revelled in the practice. There was a whole ritual surrounding the use of such fancy names. Men of letters would coin them at turning points in their lives, and would make a point of using them when referring to their friends. Pu Songling himself had several, including Liuxian (the Lingering Immortal) and Liu-quan (Mr Willow Spring). For English readers the transliterations are empty; they convey nothing, and amount to a meaningless burden. But to translate each fancy name fully would risk making the stories sound like something written by Ernest Bramah: 'O most honourable Master of the Bamboo Lodge, whither art thou wending thy weary steps?'

As for notes, in general I have provided the minimum of annotation, giving a few extracts from the commentators, old and new, when this seemed helpful, and providing information on specific details. The Glossary gives a number of broader explanations of some key terms that may seem a little daunting to the reader venturing into Chinese territory for the first time. One problem for the translator of these Chinese tales is that the Western reader is encountering two levels of strangeness at once. The culture itself is already 'other', a strange universe. And these tales are records of things found strange by a writer within that universe. In other words, certain things that were taken for granted by Pu Songling will be strange to some of his new readers the Chinese degree and examination system, the tradition of binding feet. Taoism and alchemy, to name only a few.

I have followed two modern editions: that of Zhang Youhe (1962; many times reprinted), which adheres to what he considers to have been something close to the author's original order, collating a number of traditional texts and commentators; and the more recent edition of Zhu Qikai (1989), which paraphrases into modern Chinese the old glosses, adding valuable new matter from time to time. I have often found the traditional commentators helpful, not as literary critics but as informal 'reader's companions'. I believe that their voice occasionally helps the reader to re-create the 'studio environment' so essential for an enjoyment of these tales. In Tale 54, 'Lotus Fragrance', the reader will find some of the old commentaries inserted into the text. Listed chronologically they are: Wang Shizhen (16341711) Wang Jinfan (1767) Feng Zhenluan (1818) He Shouqi (1823) Lu Zhan'en (1825) He Yin (1839) Dan Minglun (1842) Readers wishing to consult the Chinese originals are directed to the Finding List at the back of the book, where they will find a corresponding number for each tale, enabling them to go to Zhang Youhe's edition.

The wonderful illustrations are taken from the late-nineteenth-century Xianzhu Liaozhai zhiyi tuyong, first printed in Shanghai in 1886. Although coming over a hundred and seventy years after the author's death, these lithographs are a celebrated example of late-Imperial book illustration. The prominent scholar of Qing-dynasty (16441911) fiction and bibliography Qian Xingcun (Ah Ying) described them as the finest Strange Tales illustrations ever done. They help to visualize the setting, and are especially well observed in terms of details of interior decor, furniture, clothes, architectural environment and courtyard/garden layout. Because they were designed for an edition in sixteen chapters that lacked several items found in the author's original collection, there are a small number of tales without illustrations.

Of my selection of 104 tales, taken from a total of nearly five hundred, fifty-nine are from the first two chapters of the twelve-chapter edition.5 In other words, more than half the tales here have been chosen from the first eighty-two in the Chinese, while the remaining forty-five are spread over the last ten chapters. Despite this fact, I hope that my selection gives a more or less representative idea of the extraordinary range of the book. I have tried to provide enough variety to demonstrate the huge diversity of the collection, but in the end I confess that the choice was often influenced by personal preference, and by the consideration of which pieces worked best in translation. I look forward to being able to provide more of these amazing tales one day.