Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 5

by Pu Songling

  The appointed day was already imminent, and everyone in the merchant’s household was scared. When he heard of Wan’s reputation, the merchant sent an urgent invitation for Wan to come and visit his family. Fearing that Wan might find excuses for not coming, he concealed his fears and didn’t identify the real reason he was being invited.

  The merchant put on a grand banquet for Wan and at its conclusion, his daughter, a beauty of sixteen or seventeen, appeared in full make-up and paid her respects to their guest. Wan was surprised and didn’t understand what the merchant was up to, so he stood up from his seat and bowed to return her courtesies. Then the merchant pressed him to take his seat again, and told him the truth of his daughter’s situation. At first, Wan was a bit unsettled by this sudden turn of events, but since he always aspired to project a heroic image, he stayed.

  The next morning, while the merchant was busy hanging colorful decorations on their gates, he sent Wan to sit in his daughter’s room. By afternoon, the Wutong still hadn’t come and the merchant secretly hoped that perhaps the Wutong had already been destroyed.

  Before long, as the merchant watched, a bird suddenly descended from the edge of his roof and landed, proceeding afterwards to transform itself into a splendidly-attired young man, who then entered his daughter’s room. When the Wutong spirit saw Wan there, however, he spun around and ran back out.

  As Wan followed him out in close pursuit, he noticed a black miasma coming off the Wutong as it prepared to rise up into the air, so he took his sword, leapt up, and with a slashing blow cut off one of its feet, while with a mighty howl it sped away. When they bent down to take a closer look, they saw that the foot had become a giant talon the size of a hand, and no one recognized what kind of bird it was from; they searched for traces of blood and found a trail of it leading into the river.

  The merchant was overjoyed and when he found out that Wan wasn’t married, he had him make use of the very nuptial bed that previously had been prepared for the Wutong, giving his daughter to the hero to be his wife. Henceforth, whenever people were afflicted by Wutong spirits, they humbly implored Wan to spend the night at their homes. He lived in the timber merchant’s home for a year, then took his wife with him and went home.

  After that, the one remaining Wutong spirit in Wu county never dared openly harm anyone.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Wutong spirits and frog spirits have long been part of folklore, but when they arrive and carry out their promiscuous aggressions, no one dares say a word about it. Truly, throughout the entire world, Master Wan is what we call a hero!”

  409. Another Wutong Spirit

  Scholar Jin, whose courtesy name was Wangsun, lived in Suzhou. He set up a school near the Huai River and was given lodging in the garden of a retired government official. He lived in a small house there, surrounded by a variety of flowers and trees.

  At night, after dark, once the servants had all left and he was alone, Jin often found himself pacing back and forth, feeling melancholic. One night, when the third watch was almost at an end, suddenly someone rapped at his door. He quickly asked what the person needed and the response was “A light, please,” in a voice that seemed to belong to one of the boy servants.

  When he opened the door, he discovered a sixteen-year-old beauty, with a maidservant following along behind her. Jin wondered whether she might be some kind of spirit seductress, so he asked her to tell him what she wanted. She replied, “I took you for a refined scholar who was pitifully alone, so I ignored my many misgivings and came here for us to have an enjoyable night together. I’m afraid that if I say much more, I won’t dare come inside, or you won’t wish to invite me in.”

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  Huai River: Traditional divider between the northern and southern halves of China, flowing from Henan province to Jiangsu province, where it enters the Yangzi River.

  Third watch: The third of the five traditional two-hour divisions of the night, from approximately 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

  Jin then figured she must be a neighbor’s daughter and felt anxious that her presence might compromise his reputation, so he courteously thanked her for coming and left it at that. But when she gave him a coy sideways glance as she turned away, all his resistance dissolved into instant infatuation and he was no longer his own master.

  The girl’s maidservant had already figured out where this was leading, so she declared, “Lady Xia, I’d better be going.”

  The girl nodded to her. As the maidservant was leaving, the girl whispered, “Go, go, but don’t call me by that name!” Once the maidservant was gone, the girl smiled and said, “Since there’s no one else here, I had my maid come along with me. But I didn’t know that she’d blurt out my baby name in your hearing.”

  “You seem so slender and vulnerable,” he replied, “that I’m afraid something bad might come of my involvement with you.”

  “You’ll understand more later,” she assured him, “but I promise that your reputation won’t be destroyed, so you needn’t worry.”

  As she sat down on his bed and slowly undid her clothing, he noticed a bracelet on her wrist, two strips of gold passing through a pair of shining pearls; even after the candle was blown out, the light shining from her bracelet filled the room. Jin was even more surprised, simply unable to fathom where she was from or why she’d come to that place.

  Just as they finished making love, the maidservant came and knocked at the window. The girl got up, lighting a path through the dark with her bracelet, walked out through the trees and was gone. From then on, she came to Jin each night. When it came time for her to leave, he’d try to shadow her; but it was like she already felt him doing this, for she’d cover up the light of her bracelet and in the lush density of the garden’s trees it would become too dark for him even to see his own hands, so he’d have to turn back.

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  Lady Xia: Xia (霞) signifies a rosy cloud, or the glow of morning or evening light, hinting at the girl’s association with the natural (or supernatural) world rather than the explicitly human realm.

  One day, when Jin was traveling north of the Huai River, the strap on his bamboo hat broke and the wind almost blew it off, so he had to hold it on with both hands. As he arrived at the river’s edge and took a seat in a small ferry boat there, the hat came fluttering past, then began drifting in the current and was swept away. He didn’t see how he could do anything about it. After reaching the other side, he watched while a great gust of wind blew his hat round and round in the sky; when, eventually, it came falling down and landed right in his hands, the strap had been reattached to it. It was very strange.

  Upon returning home to his garden study, he told the girl what had happened; she didn’t say anything, merely offering a little smirk in response. This made Jin suspect that she was somehow responsible, so he spoke frankly: “If you happen to be some kind of immortal, I hope you’ll say so openly, to dispel any doubts about you I may have.”

  “At the point of your greatest loneliness,” she replied, “you’ve been given a lover to ease your solitude—and they say I’m not exactly ugly. What I do for you, I do freely and out of love. If you’re troubled enough to interrogate me, do you want to stop seeing me?” Jin didn’t dare say anything more about it.

  Before all this began, Jin had shouldered the responsibility of raising his sister’s daughter. After she was married, she was plagued by a Wutong spirit and though he worried about it greatly, he didn’t tell anyone else about it. Now, given that he’d been carrying on his intimate relationship with Xia for quite a while, he couldn’t keep it pent up inside any longer and he told her about the situation.

  “This kind of spirit is something my father could drive away,” she replied. “But how can I possibly take my lover’s private problem to my stern father?” Jin begged her insistently to find a way. She pondered this carefully, then told him, “This might be a simple matter after all, but I must go speak
with my father about it. It sounds like the spirits involved may be some slaves belonging to my family, and if I so much as touched one of them, I couldn’t wash away the disgrace, even with all the water in the Yangzi River.” Jin kept up his fervent pleading without stopping. “I’ll carry out my plan at once,” she assured him.

  When she came the next night, she told him, “I’ve sent my maidservant down south to do what you need. She’s not strong, so I’m afraid she may not be able to destroy the Wutong.”

  The next night, they’d just gone to sleep when the maidservant arrived and knocked at the door. Jin hurried to let her in. “How did it go?” asked Xia.

  “It was too strong for me to stop,” the maidservant answered, “but I still managed to remove its weapon.” With a laugh, Xia asked her to describe what had happened. “At first,” the maidservant explained, “I figured I’d find it at the house of the gentleman’s family; but after arriving, I began to sense that it wasn’t there. Thus I went to the son-in-law’s house, where lights had all been set out, and when I walked inside, I saw the young lady sitting under a lamp, leaning forward over the table like she was asleep. For protection, I placed her, body and spirit, into a sealed ceramic vessel.

  “Moments later, the Wutong appeared and entered the room, then backed out, exclaiming, ‘What—there’s someone else here!’ Next it scrutinized the space carefully, but didn’t find anyone. Then it came in again. At that point I was lying in the bed, ready, acting like I could hardly wait for it.

  “It lifted the quilt and got in bed, then cried in a startled voice, ‘Wait—there’s some kind of weapon here!’ All along, I had no desire to touch its filthy thing, but since I was afraid that it might find out what was going on if I waited too long, I quickly caught hold of it and castrated the spirit. The Wutong howled in terrorized agony and fled. Then after I got up and opened the ceramic vessel, the young lady woke up and I came back here.” Overjoyed, Jin expressed his gratitude to her and then the two women left together.

  When half a month went by and Xia didn’t return, Jin began to worry that he might never see her again. Then at the end of the year, after he’d closed his school and prepared to leave his lodgings with the intention of returning home, the girl suddenly came to see him. Thrilled to see her, Jin declared, “You’ve been gone such a long time, I thought for sure that you must have suffered some punishment somewhere; are we really in luck, and you’re fine?”

  “We’ve been together for a year,” she told him, “and for me to part from you without saying anything would be a pity indeed. I heard that you’d closed your school, so I came to say goodbye.” Jin implored her to come home with him.

  With a sigh, Xia replied, “What you’re suggesting is impossible! Now that we’re about to part, I can’t bear for you not to know the truth: I’m really the daughter of the Golden Dragon King and I was destined to have a relationship with you, so that’s why I came to you, for us to be together. I shouldn’t have sent my maidservant south, because now reports of her action have spread everywhere and the word is out that I had the Wutong castrated for you. When my father heard about it, he considered it such a disgrace that in his anger, he wanted to have me put to death. Fortunately, my maidservant took the blame for my actions, which eased his fury a bit; he had her thrashed with a hundred blows. Now if I so much as take a few steps somewhere, there’s always an old housemaid chaperoning me. I took this opportunity to slip away, for I can’t stand to end this because of everything I’m feeling in my heart, but there’s nothing I can do about it!”

  When she finished speaking, she turned to walk away. Jin swept her into his arms and started sobbing. “Don’t despair,” she said, “in thirty years, we can be together again.”

  “But I’m thirty now; in another thirty years, I’ll be a white-haired old man, so why would you even want to see me again?” he asked.

  “There’s no problem,” she assured him, “for in the palace of the Dragon King, there are no old men. And the question of what you’d look like is irrelevant as long as your life is extended, but if you’re really concerned about retaining your youthful looks, taking care of that should be quite easy.” Xia wrote down a recipe of what he should take to achieve the desired effect, and then left.

  When Jin returned home to Suzhou, his niece described a strange thing that had recently happened to her: “The other night, I was dreaming that I felt someone grab me and stuff me into a big ceramic serving vessel; then after I woke up, I found a lot of blood on my bed’s mattress and the Wutong was gone for good.”

  “I’ve been praying for you to the river god,” said Jin. Subsequently, people began to dismiss their suspicions regarding what had been going on with his niece.

  When Jin reached the age of sixty, his looks were still those of a man of about thirty. One day, he was crossing the Huai River, when in the distance he saw a lotus leaf that was about as big as a banquet mat floating along with a beautiful woman seated on it, and as he neared her and got a better look, he recognized her as Xia. Just as he leapt out of the boat onto the lotus leaf, the leaf, and the couple on it, all shrank until they were no bigger than a coin and then disappeared.

  This story, just like the one involving Zhao Hong, occurred near the end of the Ming dynasty, but I don’t know which of the two stories came first. If the story of Xia comes after the story about the martial talents of bowman Wan, then in southern Jiangsu province and northern Zhejiang, the maidservant reduced the only surviving Wutong spirit to a mere fraction of its former self—guaranteeing that it could no longer inflict harm on women.

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  Lotus leaf: For the lotus’ function as a symbol of transcendent beings and of love, see Eberhard (168-70).

  Zhao Hong: The pawnbroker character in the previous story, #408, “The Wutong Spirits.”

  The Ming dynasty: As the dynasty directly preceding the Qing, the Ming held power from 1368-1644.

  410. The Shen Family

  Near the banks of the Jingshui River, there lived a scholar named Shen, whose family was so poor that they couldn’t even afford to keep their fires lit all day long. When Shen and his wife tried to talk about it, they couldn’t see any way to make things better. “You’ll just have to become a bandit!” cried his wife.

  “I’m a scholar’s son,” said Shen, “and if I can’t bring honor to my ancestors, but rather disgrace my family, shaming my forefathers by living like another Dao Zhi, it’d be better for me to be exterminated and die!”

  His wife angrily replied, “Is it a disgrace for you to want to live? We’re farmers, but we have no land now, so there are only two paths here: since you’ve said that we can’t turn to robbery, I guess it’d just be better for me to become a prostitute!” This angered Shen, who told his wife that together they’d figure out a solution. His wife then reigned in her anger and went to sleep.

  Shen thought to himself: I can’t even plan two meals ahead, and my wife’s ready to become a prostitute, so I’d probably be better off dead! He quietly got out of bed, and went out and hanged himself from one of the trees in the courtyard.

  However, he watched in shock as his father arrived just then and exclaimed, “Foolish boy, this isn’t going to help you here!” Then he cut the rope keeping Shen suspended and advised him, “You can be a bandit, but you’ll have to choose a deep place in the grain field to hide. But as soon as you become rich from your brigandry, you’d better stop.”

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  Jingshui River: Located in Shaanxi province.

  Dao Zhi: A notorious brigand from ancient times.

  When his wife heard the sound of Shen falling to the ground, she was startled awake; she called to her husband, but received no response; then when she lit a lamp and went to look for him, she saw the severed rope hanging from one of the trees and Shen apparently dead beneath it. She was terrified. Shen’s wife immediately began massaging him brusquely and in moments he revived, then with her assistance h
e was soon lying down in bed. She scolded him for his juvenile behavior.

  The next morning, she told everyone that her husband was ill, then begged a neighbor for a bit of thin congee to feed him. Shen noisily slurped it down before going out on an errand. At about noon, he returned, carrying a bag of rice over one shoulder.

  His wife asked him what he was doing, and he explained, “My father has a lifelong friend who’s rich, and heretofore I felt so ashamed at the thought of begging from him that I decided not to do so. The ancients used to say, ‘A loser refuses nothing.’ Today I’m going to become a bandit, so I no longer have any cares! I hope you can cook this up quickly, because I’m ready now to go along with your suggestion and turn to robbery.” His wife was concerned that he hadn’t forgotten what she’d said earlier in anger, but she held her tongue and let the matter drop. Hence she washed the rice and made congee with it.

  When Shen had eaten his fill, he quickly found some hard wood and used his axe to make a large mallet, and once he’d managed to do so, he wanted to go out. His wife then scrutinized his rationale for doing so and when she learned his true intent, she grabbed him to stop him from going. “You’ve taught me what I should do,” Shen told her, “but this course of action will fail if we’re too restrained, so there must be no regrets!” Thus he proceeded with determination, disregarding all impediments and left.

  By nightfall, he reached the neighboring village then went and waited in hiding about a li outside it. Suddenly a violent rain began to fall, soaking everything in sight. He looked into the distance and spotted a dense thicket of trees, deciding to seek shelter there. But instead, a flash of brilliant lightning struck the village wall. It looked to him at that moment like there was someone else out walking around in the rain and he was afraid of being spotted, so when he noticed a grain bin at the base of the wall, he hurried and climbed into it, crouching down to hide.