I've had it in my mind to read the Four or Five Chinese Classics for a while now, so I was happy to find a second-hand copy of Chin P'ing Mei just before embarking on a 24-hour train ride last month. With its rapidly unfolding plot and its 863 pages, it's the right book for a long journey by rail.
Chin P'ing Mei, or as it's transliterated these days, Jin Ping Mei, is commonly known in English as either The Golden Lotus or The Plum in the Golden Vase. The book I was reading is the 1982 Perigree reprint of Bernard Miall's 1939 English translation of Franz Kuhn's earlier German translation -- clearly not the go-to edition for scholarly analysis, but one with an elevated and somewhat vintage prose style that has aged gracefully in 72 years and works well with the historical content.
The novel was written in the 17th century, late in the Ming Dynasty, but the action takes place in the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty five centuries before. Authorship is attributed to a Hsaio-hsiao-sheng, but there is no agreement on who that is, and the legend that the novel was written in a few weeks to exact revenge for a debt of honour sounds more like something from the book than something about it.
The story concerns the dalliances of Hsi Men, a wealthy individual with a large household and, at his high point, six wives; and Golden Lotus, who eventual becomes his fifth wife. Both are sexual addicts, and both are utterly amoral in the pursuit of their conquests. The pair manage to destroy quite a lot of people along the way, either directly or through their expanding circles of influence. It takes about 200 pages for the effects of their liaisons to play out after they themselves have met their untimely ends.
There's a tremendous amount of sex in this book, but it's presented in such allusive and poetic language that it's difficult to assign it an X or even an R rating. It is hard to find much raunch in a phrase like "she was well acquainted with the ways of the wind and the moon," though "they cavorted like two fish in a stream" certainly gets the idea across.
The ferocious Wu Sung, who shows up near the beginning and the end of the novel to mete out justice, is a character from Water Margin, another of the classics, which I hope to read soon. D
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