The Molten Notebook

Tutor Wang had just laid down to rest when a host of tiny spirits passed in a funeral procession.

“As he watched, his hair stood on end and he felt himself enveloped in a layer of cold, like a coverlet of frost.”

Such is the effect of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. By turns spooky, erotic, and funny, these selections from a 17th-century collection would make excellent bedtime reading for grownups or a rich cultural lode for storytellers.

Also known for its sophisticated style, the Tales remains “the pinnacle of fiction in the classical language,” according to translator John Minford.

Songling’s matter-of-fact tone lends an air of magical realism to the strangest of events. Lotus buds grow out of an old scar and bloom when a man’s lover must leave him. Another hero discovers that talkative spirits have shacked up inside his eyeballs. We read of a fairy weddings, murderous beasts, and a fellow who eats snakes raw.

While most of these tales are one-pagers that quickly evoke a sense of the uncanny, several have full story arcs with moral undertones. Fox spirits become ravishing succubi that slip into the beds of poor young scholars. A trickster priest, welcomed by a poor but hospitable fellow, proves to have whole mansions in his sleeves. As scholar Anthony Yu puts it, the stories range “from gossipy anecdotes and ethnography-like fragments to polished compositions of exquisite language and superb control.”

The author is renowned for the literary allusions he works into nearly every sentence. Reading in translation, one can only think wistfully of what a reader versed in Chinese scholarship might appreciate in the original.

Minford does include the notes of some long-ago readers in one story, as was done in old editions of the Tales. We read over the shoulder of one Feng Zhenluan as he marvels, “These words — about using love as a weapon of hatred — are a veritable Book of Life!”

The notion that these tales might be more than titillating is shared by the author himself. In his preface, Songling foresees the possibility of enlightenment, even as he spends his nights drinking in his studio to keep his pen going.

Yet in his solitude, he senses he is not alone. Writing on a spring day in 1679, he reaches out to future readers — and leaves them with a last frisson of the uncanny.

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