In 2004, Mo Yan took just forty-three days to finish the 430,000-character novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. But he said he had spent forty-three years conceiving it. When Mo Yan was a child, there was a man in his village with a blue birthmark on his face. He was the only farmer in the village who farmed independently, and every day he would walk around the village leading a donkey. He left an extraordinarily deep impression on Mo Yan. After becoming a writer, Mo Yan wanted to put this man into a novel, but he could never find a suitable narrative framework. It was only when he visited Puning Temple in Chengde and saw a picture of the six realms of reincarnation hanging on a wall that his conception of the book approached completion. From this, a novel worthy of a place in the history of world literature was born. Its name is Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.
This book tells a story of reincarnation—a man named Ximen Nao goes through five rebirths in the animal realm before finally returning to human life. The story itself is unique in literary history.
The story a great novel tells and the characters it creates should also be ones that have never appeared in literary history. If you want to write about someone, but that person has already appeared in literature, what is the point of writing about him? The same principle applies to the story itself. The story in this book has never appeared in literary history. Neither have its characters, or even its animals. Here are the most restless donkey, the most stubborn ox, the most exuberant pig, the most spirited dog, and the most mischievous monkey in literary history. Here, too, are literature’s most obstinate independent farmer, its most magical hair that can bleed, and its most dazzling moon. Whether we look at the story or at the imagination, language, and structure, it is probably hard to find another book like this anywhere in the world, and it will probably remain so.
A good story needs a writer with a rich imagination to write it. Let me give a few examples from the book so you can get a sense of Mo Yan’s imagination. In the donkey section, Mo Yan describes how the male donkey Ximen Nao has become leaps over a high wall to elope with the female donkey he loves. Reading it feels like watching two people fall in love, yet it seems perfectly reasonable when it happens to donkeys. The dogs in the book gather in the square at midnight to hold parties of their own. They are organized and disciplined, they sample human liquor, and they have thoughts of their own. In fact, Mo Yan’s imagination is already evident in the story itself.
There is little need to say much about Mo Yan’s language. Everyone knows how exuberant, sensual, and free it is. Yu Hua once described it as the language of rivers rushing onward. When reading Mo Yan, especially the passages where the imagination and language grow complex, it is easy for your mind to wander. Or rather, it is not so much that your mind wanders as that you need to concentrate: as you read those sentences, you must keep picturing the scenes Mo Yan wants to depict. When the language is simple and the imagination ordinary, it is easy to remember what the writer has said. But when the language grows complex, the reader needs to give it more attention to keep pace with the writer.
What should a writer fear most? Repetition. Some writers can produce great works, but once they have done so, they easily develop a dependence on the path they have taken—a dependence on methods that succeeded in the past. They are reluctant to try new ways of writing, because that means abandoning a method already proven to work and embracing uncertainty. We often see a Douyin creator who has attracted little attention suddenly become popular one day. Look at the videos they post afterward, and chances are they are imitating and remaking the video that went viral. We need to realize that the original video succeeded because making it was itself an attempt to try something new. Once we recognize this, it becomes much easier to step outside our comfort zone, break our dependence on familiar methods, and develop new ones.
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is different from Mo Yan’s earlier books, and I think the clearest expression of that difference is his innovation in the way he tells the story. The book is narrated mainly by two people. One is Lan Qiansui, the baby with an enormous head whom the protagonist Ximen Nao becomes after six reincarnations. The other is Lan Jiefang, the son of Ximen Nao’s farmhand. Both tell of past events from memory. Sometimes Lan Qiansui speaks; sometimes Lan Jiefang does. There is no fixed order to their narration, either. Some sections are told almost entirely by Lan Qiansui, others almost entirely by Lan Jiefang. Here I can feel Mo Yan’s strength as a writer of the first rank. As he writes, he keeps the narration flexible, leaving readers unsure who will tell the next part. There is actually a third narrator in the book: the fictional Mo Yan. In the final section, he tells how the story ends. This fictional Mo Yan is interesting in his own right. The writer Mo Yan invents another Mo Yan for the book. By his own account, he is imitating a metafictional technique previously used by Japanese writers—the author writes himself into his book. Even in writing about Mo Yan, Mo Yan does not repeat himself. Some sections contain a great deal of Mo Yan; in others, he does not appear at all. This refusal to repeat is important, because it makes a book more interesting, less rigid, and more alive with movement.
Having talked about the book’s literary elements, I now want to talk about its philosophical ones. Liu Zhenyun has said that philosophy is the underlying color of literature. Indeed, a great novel never consists only of fully realized characters and a richly developed story. It must also contain philosophy that gives us something to think about. This book is, in fact, a novel about how hatred dissolves. Ximen Nao was unjustly killed, and when he is reincarnated for the first time as a donkey, he feels resentment. That resentment is directed at those who participated, directly or indirectly, in killing him, at Lord Yama, and, above all, at fate. Ximen Donkey cannot accept his fate. He cannot accept that he has become a donkey, because he still retains his human memories. This is the most painful thing of all. A person can certainly become an animal, but must never carry the memories of being human into that life. As the story continues, the reader can see all the hatred in Ximen Nao gradually receding. Perhaps it fades because he is slowly letting go and beginning to accept his fate. But I think it is really a choice to accept what has been ordained for him because he is powerless to do otherwise.
How many people feel that before they were born, they were handed a script—one they did not choose, but were assigned? This assignment is entirely random, beyond anyone’s control. The script you receive might be one many people envy, or one many people would hate. But I think most people feel they have been given a bad script, even when, objectively speaking, theirs is quite a good one. In living this life, we are doing no more than playing the roles we are supposed to play. At first we dislike our own scripts and envy other people’s. But we need to grow, to mature, and to slowly accept our fate. We should not dislike our fate. We should imagine it as our child. Good parents should be able to gladly accept their children as they are. Your child may be naughty and make a mess of your life, but as parents, we need to love our children, to love them as they show themselves to be. We need to become the fathers and mothers of our fate. Whatever upheavals this child brings into our lives, we need to like him.
We need to let go not only of our hatred of fate, but also of our hatred of the people around us. Hatred only darkens us inside. It cannot solve anything. Sometimes it serves only as the fuse for a greater disaster. Some say hatred can make us strong. But if our strength is rooted in hatred of others, a day will come when it can no longer stand, because hatred will not last forever, and no one will ever become strong because of hatred. If we do not free ourselves from it, even if we do become stronger, we will do more evil and spread hatred to more people’s hearts. If that happens, we will not live this life well. What we should do is eliminate hatred. If we are bullied, we should make ourselves stronger, and then forgive those who once bullied us.
As I approach the end, I want to return to our theme: beneath the Buddha’s lowered gaze, life and death are both wearisome. I also want to bring in something said by Liu Zhenyun, a writer I like very much: on different streets around the world, every person walking carries scars inside; it has been hard for everyone.
I have always believed strongly in this idea: we are, in fact, souls, and we inhabit these bodies merely to experience what a being that is not a soul would feel. Living in these bodies, we grow tired, fall ill, and die. People with disabilities and people in good health all experience the weariness of being alive. The poor and the wealthy all experience the weariness of being alive. Pessimists and optimists, too, all experience the weariness of being alive. We all feel weary, so what matters most is to free ourselves from that weariness. By eating well and keeping healthy daily routines, making more friends, spending more time close to nature, reading more, and thinking more, we can keep weariness as far from our lives as possible.
要政阳
October 17, 2026, Santa Clara