Imagine if a national political figure like Benjamin Franklin was also a paranormal investigator, one who wrote up his investigations with a storytelling flair that reads like a combination of M.R. James, Lafcadio Hearn, and Zhuangzi-with a dash of the bureaucratic absurdism of Kafka sprinkled in, alongside a healthy dose of H.P. Lovecraft's weird antiquarianism. In China, at roughly the same time that Franklin was filling the sky with electrified kites, there was such a figure. He was Special Advisor to the emperor of China, Imperial Librarian, and one of the most celebrated scholars and poets of his time. His name was Ji Yun (纪昀).
Beginning in 1789, Ji Yun published five volumes of strange tales that combined supernatural and frequently moving autobiographical accounts with early speculative fictions. By turns darkly comic, terrifying, and transcendentally mystical, they revolutionized Chinese speculative fiction and nonfiction, and portrayed a China never before depicted: one poised between old ways and new, where repeating rifles shared the world with Tibetan black-magic, Jesuit astronomers rubbed elbows with cosmic horrors, and a vibrant sex trade of the reanimated dead was conducted in the night.
Combining insights into Chinese magic and metaphysics with tales of cannibal villages, sentient fogs, and alien encounters; as well as nightmarish narratives of soul swapping, haunted cities, and fox spirits; there is no literary work quite like that of Ji Yun. Designed as both entertainment and an occult technology that awakens readers to new dimensions of reality, one cannot walk away from his stories unchanged. The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a literary translation of Ji Yun's most masterful tales.
Essential reading for anyone fascinated by the weird, the paranormal, or the rich literary and historical traditions of China. The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a must for fans of M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Lafcadio Hearn, and the Taoist and Buddhist metaphysics that inspired them. A collection of tales truly stranger than fiction, it opens new avenues for understanding supernatural phenomena and bizarre events through the unique perspective of one of China's most celebrated scholars, politicians, and investigators of Chinese X-files.
