Spitting on Ghosts: Fables and Fairy Tales from Early China

Abstract

A glimpse through this engaging booklet suggests that it is not a fable book in the sense I follow. The book's stories seem heavy on ghosts, magic, and transformations. Its format is engaging. The left and right page edges cut into a section of blue text in large characters. Might this be a title? Next to this is apparently the fuller text. Cartoon panels are numbered and move down one page before going across to the facing page. There is a system of chapter headings and story titles that confuses me. No chapter has more than one subheading. Some chapters have no subheading. There are nineteen stories on 120 pages. Typos occur, as in the third panel overall: Ghosts don't exits! This story itself is on the borderline, I would say. A man disproves the existence of ghosts by asking the apparently irrefutable question: Do ghosts' clothes have ghosts too? Apparently those who saw ghosts saw them clothed. One day a man comes by to talk philosophy, gets into an argument over ghosts, and then scares the wits out of our man by revealing that he, the visitor, is a ghost. Do not trust to your limited knowledge is the story's lesson. The second story raises a question not much at home in the fable world: If one's mother turns into a turtle and swims away, should one give a funeral for her? In the third story, a man makes love to a woman he happens to meet and gives her a bell as a memento. He follows her the next morning to a house, and here he learns that there is no woman in this house, only a pig. He finds the pig wearing a bell. That story stopped my reading! Tsai Chih Chung is apparently a very popular comic book artist. The seller's information lists the book as a first edition from 2005, even though I see on the final page dates of 2006 and 2007. My suspicion is that the book is copyrighted in 2005 and has a first printing in 2006 and a second printing in 2007. In fact, in his detailed description, the seller gives 2006 as the book's date. The advertisement claims that the book includes over 100 fabulous tales.