Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  presence of the cat in New Year prints of the wedding of the mouse.

  The sun, a cloud, the wind, and a wall are not the only candidates that are rejected by the parents of the rodent bride. In a drum ballad from north eastern China titled The Rat Marries a Cat (Haozi qu mao), the mouse insists on a kitten as bride for his son after rejecting a weasel, a ground squirrel, and a rabbit.

  The outcome is of course the same: the bride-to-be and her mother eat their fill of the bride-fetching party.18 This drum ballad is a rare example of an independent extensive treatment of the theme of the marriage of the mouse in traditional popular literature. But the last line discloses that the text is a prequel to the story of the court case of the mouse against the rat. 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 for the mouse’s burning desire to take revenge on the cat.

  As noted above, the marriage of the mouse (in whatever version) is a popu-

  lar topic in New Year prints and in papercuts. Such works show the wedding

  procession, which will at least include the rodent bride in her sedan chair and the various pipers and drummers. The groom is often depicted riding a horse, but one also encounters prints in which he is riding a rabbit. Some works may also show the many carriers that transport her trousseau.19 As a rule, they also include a disproportionally large cat. In one print titled Cat Mountain (Limao shan), in which the mice are dressed in red and green, the wedding procession is confronted by five cats. The print carries a simple eight-line poem that reads: The mouse demons are strong by nature

  And make their home in granary rooms.

  Having selected the bride-fetching date,

  The groom brings home the bride today.

  He only thinks he has to travel forward,

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  When suddenly he sees the kings of cats:

  Each of them with its maw wide open—

  It scares the mice into a frantic flight!20

  The bride and the groom in this picture are portrayed as humans, but the

  thought balloons above their heads show them fleeing in their original shape, as rats and on all fours. Some prints show the mice trying to buy off the cat by offering the animal fish and other dainties, not always successfully, as some prints show the cat grabbing a mouse.

  In one nineteenth-century multi-scene New Year print from Taohuawu,

  near Suzhou, titled The Marriage of the Mouse at the Bottomless Cave (Wudidong laoshu jianü), the story of the marriage of the mouse has been integrated with the story of the attempt of the White Mouse Demon to marry the holy

  monk Xuanzang. In the song that accompanies the picture, the White Mouse

  Demon makes all preparations for a formal wedding. Even the King of Cats

  is invited to the send-off party at her parental home, and because he is well fed with meat dishes, he kindly allows the mouse to take the monk. This time Xuanzang is saved before the consummation of the marriage by the intervention of the bodhisattva Guanyin (in The Journey to the West she always comes to the rescue when her beloved pilgrim finds himself in dire straits and all other measures have failed). Guanyin, who can take on any shape to rescue

  those who need her help, this time transforms herself fittingly into a cat (a vegetarian one, of course):

  Together they travel

  Wanting to seek sutras:

  Endless sufferings and tribulations!

  Honoring the Buddha

  They meet on their road

  Monsters that manifest themselves:

  They seek to survive and return home while alive.

  They meet again and again with monstrous demons.

  There is this thousand-year-old huge mouse spirit—

  As soon as this spirit sees the monk she is pleased,

  And has matchmakers arrange this perfect match.

  A trousseau is prepared to send along with the bride;

  And the bridal sedan chair, escorted by loud music,

  Arrives at the mice’s mansion to fetch the bride—

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  The pipes blare and the drums roar without end.

  They also have invited the King of the Cats to attend:

  They’ve set out flowers and wine, offer fine meats,

  So that old cat eats his fill and laughs out loudly.

  “I’ll let you go and marry that monk of the Tang!”

  When the Mahasattva Guanyin hears about this,

  She immediately turns herself into a cat spirit.

  When she arrives outside the grotto and roars,

  The mouse is frightened on hearing the sound.

  Inside her grotto the mouse is scared witless,

  And in her panic manifests her original shape.

  Celestial gods imprison her below a mountain,21

  And the Tang monk expresses his gratitude.

  When Sun Wukong arrives, he is filled with joy;

  Monk Sha and Zhu Bajie also feel very happy.

  After crossing the River That Leads to Heaven,

  Master and disciples all arrive at Thunderclap.

  After having received the sutras, they return:

  Their story is told through eternity, till today.22

  A late-Qing New Year print titled The Mouse Marries Off Its Daughter in Western Style (Xiyang laoshu jianü) includes not only the wedding procession, Xuanzang, and the Bottomless Cave, but also the cat that feigns to have

  turned to religion. The main body of this print is, as usual, taken up by the wedding procession of the mouse. In the lower left-hand corner one sees

  Xuanzang and his companions (from the back) making their way toward the

  Bottomless Cave in the upper right-hand corner. In the upper left-hand corner a large cat is reading the sutras, while a long row of mice parades past the cat—the last one in the line, we know, will be eaten.23

  Some of the modern papercuts are quite long and show the wedding proces-

  sion in great detail. In the 1990s, the couple Yu Ping and Ren Ping created something of a stir with their elaborate sets of papercuts, one of which was printed in 1993 in a bilingual edition as The Marriage of Miss Mouse. In this work the papercuts are accompanied by a long text in the traditional ballad meter that recounts the story with special emphasis on the members of the procession and the articles in the bride’s trousseau.24 Another set of large color papercuts on the theme of the marriage of the mouse by the same artists was exhibited This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:36 UTC

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  in 1991 in the Taiwan Museum of Art.25 Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, some villages in China, such as Xinfan in Zhejiang, have started to enact the wedding procession of the rodent bride in proper costume.26

  The Court Case

  The court case of the mouse against the cat does not need the latter’s brutal murder of the mouse bride or its carnage of the wedding guests as motivation.

  After all, mice and rats are killed by cats all the time. Many versions of the case of the mouse against the cat therefore start straightaway with the arrival of the soul of the slain rodent in the underworld, where it appeals for justice to King Yama, accusing the cat of unprovoked murd
er.27

  The setting of a court case, with its many fixed procedures, apparently holds great appeal to authors of beast epics East and West. One reason may be that the many functionaries involved in the legal process, from judges to wardens and from court clerks to lawyers, can be assigned to various kinds of animals or birds. Another reason may be that the use of the formal language of the

  court by unlikely litigants will be experienced as humorous. The testimonies in front of the judge allow the parties not only to put their own twist on the facts of the case but also to vaunt their own qualities and to paint a negative picture of their opponent. And so the medieval Dutch beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde starts when its protagonist the fox is summoned to court to face its accusers, while the two versions of the Rhapsody of the Swal ow (Yanzi fu) that were discovered at Dunhuang have the swallow appeal to the court when its

  nest has been occupied during its absence by a sparrow that refuses to leave.

  In the Dutch work, the judge is the gullible and easily misled lion, while in the Chinese texts the phoenix, the king of birds, arrives at a just verdict. In a long tale in classical Chinese that circulated in Korea during the Choson dynasty, titled The Narrative of the Court Case of the Rat (Korean: Sŏ okki; Chinese: Shuyu shuo) and often credited to Im Che (1549–1587), the mice and rats that have plundered a granary are summoned by the god of that institution. In

  their defense the rodents claim that the various trees in front of the granary have allowed them to eat the grain, and when these have been summoned and

  declared their innocence, the rodents point to the door gods; when these have been summoned and declared their innocence, the rodents try to shift the

  blame to other pairs of animals (starting with cats and dogs), which one by one are summoned and claim their innocence. Eventually the desperate god

  of the granary submits the case to the judgment of the Jade Emperor, who

  orders him to execute the rodents and exterminate their offspring and also

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  allows all unjustly accused animals to take their revenge by devouring mice and rats. Since then, the story concludes, care is taken that no rodent should enter a granary, while cats are at liberty to kill mice and rats.28

  In the case of the overwhelming majority of adaptations of the Chinese

  story of the court case of the mouse against the cat, the setting is the underworld.29 From ancient times, the deceased have sought justice and revenge

  by appealing to the courts of the Chinese underworld. By the end of the tenth century, that underworld bureaucracy had acquired more or less the features it would retain for the next millennium. The highest ruler had become King

  Yama, an Indian deity introduced to China by Buddhism. Together with nine

  high judges, he presides over the ten courts of the underworld. These judges are supported in their tasks by a large staff of associate judges and clerks, because the files that carefully keep track of sins and merits are enormous.

  In difficult cases the judges also make use of the “sin-mirror,” or “karma-

  scope” ( yejing), which shows the true nature of any soul reflected by it. If a case requires that a soul be summoned from the world of light as culprit or witness, the judges have at their beck and call a large number of ghostly constables, including Horseface and Oxhead. Once a soul has been judged, it is granted an immediate new reincarnation on one of the six paths of rebirth

  (e.g., as divinity, human being, hungry ghost, or animal), or it is condemned to short-term, long-term, or eternal imprisonment and torture in hell.30 The scope of the underworld judges’ tasks is greatly increased as not only human souls appear before them, but souls of animals as well. Illustrations from

  Dunhuang show animals holding their statements of accusation in their

  mouth as they appear before King Yama.31 We may assume these animals are

  accusing their human owners for the abuse they suffered during their lives.

  From the Tang dynasty we also have classical tales in which slain animals

  seek justice in the underworld after they have been killed by hunters or cruelly abused before their death by inventive cooks.32 From the Yuan dynasty we

  have a long set of arias in the voice of a slaughtered ox; it appeals to King Yama by enumerating its contributions while alive to the well-being of mankind.33 The mouse may have been the earliest animal to lodge a complaint

  with King Yama against another animal, but it was not the only one. Late-

  imperial popular literature includes a number of texts in which increasingly smaller creatures accuse increasingly smaller creatures, culminating in the court case of the louse against the flea and the bedbug.34

  The simplest literary version of the court case of the mouse against the cat may well be the prose “case file” that has been preserved in a printed edition of the early nineteenth century and is titled Newly Composed: The Mutual This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:36 UTC

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  Accusations of the Cat and the Mouse (Xinbian Maoshu xianggao).35 This text consists of the formal accusation of the mouse (who calls on the house dog

  as witness), the defense statement of the cat, and the final verdict by King Yama. Part of the charm for Chinese readers must have been that they could

  read the accusation and defense statements as parodies of the model legal

  documents that were included in household encyclopedias and specialist

  handbooks for litigation masters.36

  More commonly, however, the court case was adapted as a prosimetric

  ballad or a narrative song, which included at least a basic narrative. The earliest of such versions that I am acquainted with is The Scroll of the Accusation of the Mouse against the Cat (Laoshu gao limao juan), which is included in a manuscript that is dated to 1803. This text, basically written in ten-syllable lines, is also remarkable because it is one of the few adaptations in which King Yama does not want to decide for either party and orders them to live in harmony—

  as a rule, King Yama initially is easily persuaded by the complaint of the mouse but ends up judging in favor of the cat, which is then ordered to kill rodents wherever it may find them.37 A full translation is included in this chapter. The Scroll of the Accusation of the Mouse against the Cat also survives in woodblock-printed editions of a later date.38 In this edition, titled Newly Printed: The Accusation of the Mouse against the Cat (Xinke laoshu gao limao), the opening passage in which the mouse requests the ox (as we saw, a veteran in the underworld courts) to draft its statement of accusation has been replaced by an

  eight-line poem on the enmity of the mouse and the cat, but the accusation of the ox while alive against its owner is still mentioned in a new final poem: King Yama in his court hall summons his celestial staff:

  Creating sin the many creatures all offend the law!

  In days bygone the plowing ox submitted its complaint,

  Today the mouse lodged its complaint against the cat!

  The collection of materials related to Pu Songling in the library of Keio

  University in Tokyo contains the manuscript of a ballad, also composed in

  ten-syllable lines, titled The Different Statements of the Cat and the Mouse, Opposed by Nature (Maoshu yixing butong ci). The original title page carries the inscription “Written out in his own hand by Pu Songling” (Pu Songling

  shouchao). If this claim would be true, The Different Statements would predate The Scroll of the Accusation of the Mouse
against the Cat by nearly a century, but so far no one has accepted this claim because the handwriting of the

  manuscript shows little or no indication of being by Pu—it actually is at times This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:36 UTC

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  quite clumsy. This text starts out with a few lines on the variety in size and nature of creatures since earliest times, and briefly describes how a mouse is killed and devoured by a cat, before it turns to the accusation of the mouse against the cat in the court of King Yama. In its statement before the bench, the mouse claims that it actually is not stealing any grain, as it is entitled to its share because of its services to the state by having saved—at the command of King Yama!—the second Tang emperor, Li Shimin, and his troops from

  starvation during a campaign on the Korean peninsula:

  When Gaisuwen

  In Liaodong

  Issued his declaration of war,39

  The second king of the Tang

  Commanded his infantry and cavalry

  And in person led the campaign.40

  On arriving at Jumping Tiger,

  That city at the Three Rivers,

  He encountered a major disaster:

  Inside they lacked grain,

  Outside they lacked hay,

  And no troops came to their rescue.

  At that time

  Your Majesty Lord Yama

  Issued an oral proclamation,

  Ordering the rats

  That very same night

  To take stolen supplies to the army.

  That very same night

  They delivered

  Ten thousand stones of grain and hay,