Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary by Wilt L. Idema (review)

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales & Commentary is an informative and delightfully entertaining survey of an exceptionally lively topic. Its ambitiously inclusive selection of cat-, mouse-, and (most prominently) cat-and-mouse-themed writings covers the entire span of Chinese history, from "Fat Rats" ("Shishu") in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing, ca. 600 b.c.e.) to Fang Hao's Empire of Cats (Mao diguo, 2010). The bulk of examples, however, are drawn from a narrower band of vernacular works of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. As the author notes in the introductory chapter, while Chinese "oral traditions of animal tales are as rich as any other tradition in the world," the classical tradition is considerably less voluminous, especially for "tales that feature talking animals" (p. 8). And therefore, only one of the book's five chapters (chapter 1) is devoted to the literati tradition of poetry and prose in the classical language. The other four chapters primarily discuss and present extended excerpts from vernacular sources ranging from late Ming colloquial fiction like Journey to the West (Xiyouji, ca. 1592) and One Hundred Court Cases (Baijia Gongan, ca. 1594) to late Qing baojuan (precious scrolls) and other oral storytelling scripts in various genres, some of them preserved only in manuscript form or as transcriptions of modern and contemporary performances. Thanks in part to this emphasis on non-elite literature, the reader is treated to sources that are not only relatively unknown outside or in some cases even within China but also not often found together within the same volume. And given the nearly universal human interest in this topic, especially in our post-anthropocentric cultural moment, the book is further enriched by the many comparisons it makes to South Asian, West Asian, and European literary traditions, which the author deploys both to identify foreign influences or sources and to highlight China's distinctive contributions to this diminutive but very animated niche of Weltliteratur.

As noted, the bulk of the book comprises translations and descriptions of late imperial-era vernacular works, many of them—at least in their currently extant forms—from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The author makes the point that while these two animals are present in a variety of narrative genres, such as zhiguai (accounts of the supernatural) tales of seduction by animal spirits or other nonhumans disguised as sexually alluring women or boys, it was only in vernacular and performative texts of the mid- to late Qing that cats and mice began to appear primarily in their normative animal forms and not dissembling as human beings. While some of these later works are well known, many are not, and some exist only in fragments or as unpublished, hard-to-find manuscripts. Among these latter, the longest and arguably most interesting piece translated by the author is a prosimetric tale of a war between mice and cats known as Wuying zhuan (here titled A Tale without Shape or Shadow, pp. 131-153), based on a nineteenth-century manuscript held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

This last work comes at the end of three chapters (2, 3, and 4) that trace the evolution of two dominant streams of cat-and-mouse tales: court cases (gongan) that situate their conflict—or at least its "resolution"—under the auspices of the famously incorruptible judge Bao Zheng, or of Yama, the judge of the underworld; and the folkloric "wedding of the mice" (or mice marrying cats) that was a popular subject of calendar prints and papercuts and may have derived—at least in one of its variants—from the Indian work Panchatantra (p. 86). These two strands are treated separately but also together, since in "traditional popular literature, detailed accounts of the marriage of the mouse are most commonly found in extended versions of the story of the court case, in which it serves as an explanation...