Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 21
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Treat your mother-in-law
Over at their house
With the filial piety that is her due:
Scrape together
Some leftover rice
To show her your filial respect.
You and your husband
Are both still young
And have to live in good harmony;
As for your sisters-in-law—
Don’t quarrel with them
And do not indulge in mean gossip.
Each late evening
When leaving the hole
You have to be very careful indeed:
As soon as the cat
Will have seen you,
It will want to kill you immediately!
Please make sure
To remember these words
That I now have entrusted to you—
In that case
Your mother
Will have no need to be worried.”
When the cat notices the wedding preparations at the house of the groom,
he decides to dress up as an owl (a “cat-headed eagle” in Chinese):
The little cat,
Dozing on the stove,
Gave this matter careful thought:
“At Li Family Bay
That family of mice
Is sending their daughter off in marriage,
And at her new home
They receive the bride
Today in the evening.
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This Heaven-given
Good opportunity
Definitely cannot be missed,
So I will turn into
A hooting owl
By dressing up in disguise.
The hooting owl
And I, we share
A face that is very similar:
I will make
A hooked nose
That I’ll place above my mouth.
My whole body
Is one ball of hair
And I don’t have any wings,
But I will make
A bird-skin gown
That I can wear on my body.
I’ll grab my chance
And join the procession
To crash into the hole of the mice;
Each one I see
I will swallow whole:
This will be one great battle!”
Disguised as an owl, the cat is indeed warmly welcomed by the mice. This
may well strike many readers as strange, because in nature owls survive largely on a diet of rodents, but at least in one Chinese folktale the mouse and the owl are old friends because of their collaboration in bringing light to the world—
blinded by the light of the sun, both animals became creatures of the night.16
But when the cat takes off his disguise, the feast turns into a massacre:
The little cat
Joined the procession
And arrived at the gate of the hole.
The many mice
Came out of the hole
And all welcomed him warmly,
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And when they saw
Their old uncle,
They showed him all due respect.
Eight tables inside,
Eight tables outside:
Tables and benches were set out:
The assembled mice
Drank marriage wine
And all were filled with great joy.
The little cat
Had taken his place
And also drank of the wine;
He pushed his cup,
Exchanged a glass,
And three rounds were done.
When the groom
Arrived at his table
In order to pour him some wine,
This old uncle
Took off his gown
And showed his original shape:
He opened his maw
And he snorted once,
His eyes resembling bronze bells.
He killed in one bite
The groom and also
Those who had escorted the bride;
He killed in one bite
The assembled guests
And also the many messengers.
For each mouse swallowed
The cat snorted once,
Gulping them down like tiger or wolf.
He created such havoc
That there in the great hall
Tables and benches were overturned;
The cups and plates
Were all broken into
Small shards and dusty powder.
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The grown-up mice
Were so scared
They scampered to east and west,
The little mice
Could only squeak
And keep on begging for their lives.17
Following this massacre, the murdered mice clamor for revenge and the father of the groom appeals to King Yama.
Pr equels: The War of the Mice
against the Cat
One way to expand the story of the court case of the mouse against the cat was the inclusion of the war of the rodents against the felines. Although the theme of the war between the mice and the cat was popular for over three thousand years in the Middle East and western Europe, in China the theme can only
be traced from the beginning of the nineteenth century.18 The earliest-known independent treatment of the theme is a drum ballad called The Revolt of the Mice (Shujing zuofan), which is only known from an edition of the 1920s. Its anonymous author complains that one only can find accounts of the court
case of the mouse against the cat but none about its background, so he fills the gap by producing the story of the war of the rodents against the cat. The narrative is constructed according to the five watches of the night, and in the first watch the rodents, frustrated by the continuous predations of the cats, appeal to their mighty ancestors the Five Rats and the White Mouse and
amass a mighty army:
Thousandyears White and Tenthousandyears Black,
And then there was a maiden called Onesquint Red.
Thousandyears White was made commander in chief,
Tenthousandyears Black served as the vanguard.
Then there was a youngster who was very brave:
Attacked by a cat it had been blinded in one eye.
The men and the women all raised their wild cries;
A battalion of widows—some old and some young!19
At the head of the troops ran none but Half a Leg,
Behind him the great banner was raised in the sky,
Blades and lances, swords and spears, heavy cudgels;
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Then there were lame guys with shooting stars.20
The tribe of the rats had now risen in revolt—
Non
e knows the outcome yet of this rebellion!
In the second watch the cat is woken up by the noise of the mice army, and
in the third watch the two sides confront each other:
In the third watch the moon is as bright as can be:
The commander in chief of the rats gives his orders.
When speaking his words, he addresses his officers,
“You, my generals, now listen to my instructions!
Today, marching forth, we will engage in battle,
On first arrival, I assure you, we will be victorious.
That old cat, he is bound to lose this engagement:
As of today we will never suffer from destitution.
If today in this battle we do not achieve victory,
We, old and young, count as a blown-out candle!”
The rats set out their battle lines most perfectly.
When on the other side the cat roared only once,
The mice at first sight lost all their determination
And madly squealing they ran from disaster!
Many of the fleeing mice are captured by the cat, which dines on his prey
in the fourth watch:
The old cat was secretly thinking to himself,
“Today at long last I’ll have to break my fast.”
Discarding one and releasing him below a chest,
He swallowed the other mice with hide and hair.
When he had polished off that one Half a Leg,
He also consumed the maiden Onesquint Red;
He stuffed Thousandyears White in his stomach,
Bagged Tenthousandyears Black in his belly.
He ate all the mice and rats he had captured,
Without cooking, roasting, or wokking in oil.
So the revolt of the rodents ends in utter defeat, after which the souls of the slain appeal to King Yama for revenge.21
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It is impossible to determine how original The Revolt of the Mice may have been. We have no idea when it was composed—it is quite possible that the
present text was only put together in the early years of the twentieth century.22
But an account of the war of the mice against the cat is already included in A Tale without Shape or Shadow (Wuying zhuan), which dates at least from as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century. This version of the court case of the mouse against the cat, which appears to have circulated
widely in Shanxi, also includes an elaborate account of the cats’ raid of the bride-fetching party of the mice, which easily makes it the most elaborate
adaptation of the court case. More literally, the title should be translated as A Tale without Shadow, but I understand wuying as short for wuxing wuying (without shape or shadow) and believe it stresses the fictionality of the tale: it’s a work of fantasy.23 A Tale without Shape or Shadow, which is written with considerable wit, sets out with an elaborate description of the preparations for the wedding of the son of Old Mouse, but the bride-fetching party is
ambushed by a bunch of cats, and Old Mouse loses both his son and daughter-
in-law. Swearing to take revenge, he mobilizes the army of rodents, but in a fierce battle he is utterly defeated and dies, whereupon he decides to lodge an accusation with King Yama, with the usual result.
A Tale without Shape or Shadow apparently never was printed. In recent years some manuscripts of A Tale without Shape or Shadow have been offered for sale on internet sites for secondhand books in China. The earliest of
these is dated to Daoguang 21 (1841). The present whereabouts of most
of these manuscripts, however, are unclear. A comparison of sample pages of these texts provided on the web suggests that the texts of these manuscripts are far from identical. The Harvard-Yenching Library also holds a manuscript copy of A Tale without Shape or Shadow. My translation is based on this text, not because it is necessarily the best, but because it is the only one that is available in a public collection and also happens to have the advantage of
being complete.24 The text that was published in 1992 in the journal Shanxi Folk Literature (Shanxi minjian wenxue) as A Tale without Shape or Shadow by Zhong Shengyang was based on the memory of a manuscript version of
the text Zhong had read in the years before the Cultural Revolution:
I love popular literature. The story of the rat marrying a bride ( A Tale without Shape or Shadow) is popular all over northern China. In my youth I often heard my father tell this story, and I almost knew it all by heart. In those days we at home had my father’s handwritten copy. Later I carried that with This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:39 UTC
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me, but in the early days of the Cultural Revolution I inadvertently lost it, so now I have recorded it on the basis of my memory, hoping it may serve
as a small literary memory of my late father to remember him by.25
Yet another version of A Tale without Shape or Shadow was published by a certain Hao Wanhui in 1989 in the journal Folk Literature (Minjian wenxue) as “The Mouse Lodges an Accusation against the Cat” (Laoshu gao limao). In this case no information is provided on the origin of the text, which may well incorporate elements of oral performance. One specific
element of this edition is its detailed description of the wedding prepara-
tions, which is more extensive than the corresponding passage in the manu-
script in the Harvard-Yenching Library. A second specific element of this
edition is its elaborate account of the battle of the rodents and the felines.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only version in which a badger joins the fray on the side of rodents, while the cats eventually achieve victory
thanks to the intervention of a chained guard dog that breaks free to save
them from imminent defeat.
The Harvard-Yenching Library manuscript of A Tale without Shape or
Shadow has its own special aspects in comparison with the other versions I have been able to consult. One remarkable feature of this manuscript is, for instance, the emphasis that is placed on the foreign origin of the cat, in contrast to the status of the mouse as a propertied local citizen. This reminds one of the court case of the swallow against the sparrow. In both versions of the Rhapsody of the Swal ow discovered at Dunhuang, the sparrow claims a privileged status in court because it is a local tax-paying citizen, whereas the swallow is a migrant sojourner. Also noteworthy is the long story by the cat of its role in the suppression of the Five Rats. This is told by the cat as part of its statement in court to explain how it ended up in China as a foreign expert.
This version further complicates the characterization of the cat, as it portrays itself very much as a reluctant executioner.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the Harvard-Yenching Library manu-
script of A Tale without Shape or Shadow is those passages that suggest that the text should be read as a political fable: Master Hu, the underworld clerk who kindly offers to write the cat’s statement of defense for free, reveals himself to be Hu Di, the student who loudly protested against the injustice of the death of the patriotic general Yue Fei (1103–1142) at the hands of the evil minister Qin Gui and thereupon was invited to the underworld by King
Yama to observe the punishment of Qin Gui and the deification of Yue Fei.
Master Hu compares the accusation against the cat with the slander suffered This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:39 UTC
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by Yue Fei.26 To the best of my knowledge, the Harvard-Yenching Library
manuscript of A Tale without Shape or Shadow is the only version of this title in which Master Hu has such a cameo appearance.
A Tale without Shape or Shadow
A Tale without Shape or Shadow (Wuying zhuan) is a prosimetric narrative, which means that its story is told in an alternation of verse and prose.27 For the verse sections, the most common line consists of seven syllables. The text has been preserved in a number of manuscripts from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, some of which are damaged. The text appears to have
been widely popular in Shanxi.28
A Tale without Shape or Shadow
Anonymous
Since he was born, Old Mouse did never have a normal life: