For a book to earn a place on the stage of world literature, its inspiration must grow from the culture, history, and everyday life of a people. Sandalwood Death brings all three together with extraordinary completeness. Yet what makes a novel great is not only where it draws its material from, but also how boldly it reinvents its form. Mo Yan gives this book two voices: the sound of the railway cutting through Gaomi and the sound of Gaomi’s local Maoqiang opera, which the novel calls “cat opera.” Through them, he tells a story rooted in an actual event in Chinese history. Maoqiang’s arias and spoken passages follow rhyme and rhythm; their music makes the prose easy to read and full of surprises.
Sandalwood Death is set at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Germans began building a railway through Gaomi County in Shandong and provoked the anger of local people. Among the resisters, a man named Sun Bing emerges as their leader—and becomes the man condemned to die by the sandalwood punishment. The story does not unfold chronologically. The first part, “Phoenix Head,” is narrated in the first person by four main characters. The second, “Pig Belly,” shifts to the third person. The third, “Leopard Tail,” returns to the first person as five characters recount the hours before the execution and the events of the day itself. The chronology leaps back and forth, yet the movement somehow remains fluid. Its tightly joined structure is a testament to Mo Yan’s command of his craft.
What Is True Literature?
What kind of literature deserves to be called truly good? For me, good literature begins with a good story. It also needs fine writing, and finally, a measure of philosophical thought.
Mo Yan knows how to tell a story. From what I know of the place where he grew up and of his childhood experiences, I believe his gift was nourished by all the stories—some true, some not—that he heard from adults when he was young. Creative inspiration comes from life. Whether those stories were fact or fiction hardly matters. Imagination always contains something invented, as does literature itself; if everything were true, we would have no need for literature. Life cannot do without literature, because reading expands the world we know. But literature cannot do without life either, because life is the ground on which it stands.
In the village of Mo Yan’s childhood there was no electric light, and scientific knowledge was scarce. That left ample room for the villagers’ imaginations. Over time, the stories Mo Yan heard from people around him accumulated into a reservoir of inspiration. Take the legend of the tiger whisker. Whoever possesses one, the story goes, can see every person’s true form—a cat, a leopard, a white snake, or perhaps a wolf or tiger. Mo Yan folded this folk belief into Sandalwood Death. Xiaojia, the fool in the novel, constantly urges his wife to get him a tiger whisker from Qian Ding. Once he has it, he discovers that his wife is a snake and his father a black leopard… The same legend also appears in Mo Yan’s Folk Tales.
Listening to stories was not Mo Yan’s only way of gathering material. He also drew on his own experience and his close observation of life, and many characters in his fiction have real people behind them. I suspect his understanding of executioners came from a neighbor who was a police officer. The neighbor’s accounts of killing—of its process and the thoughts that accompany it—helped Mo Yan create such a fully dimensional executioner in Sandalwood Death. An executioner has to remain calm while taking a life. To do that, he must believe that he is carrying out the will of the state; that if he refuses, someone else will do it; that the condemned are guilty rather than innocent; and that killing them serves the nation and benefits its people. Yet even an executioner can feel tenderness toward life. Accidentally crushing an ant may still stir something inside him. Zhao Jia, the novel’s renowned executioner, has even received honors from the emperor. Countless deaths lie behind him, but when he carries out a death by a thousand cuts, his heart is troubled all the same. He has to indoctrinate himself anew before he can regain his composure.
Mo Yan’s prose is equally rare. His style is free, wild, and headlong, forever refusing to behave as expected. One moment it darts east, the next west; one moment it pulls north, the next south. Reading Mo Yan is like riding a small boat across a storm-tossed sea. The boat rises and falls violently, without rest. No two waves are alike, and no two encounters with them feel the same—just as Mo Yan never seems to repeat himself. From the boat, you glimpse all kinds of creatures, each utterly distinct: some real, some invented. When you finally reach shore, you are grateful to be alive, yet the waves and the creatures remain branded in your memory.
That is what Mo Yan feels like to me. His mind seems to hold tens of thousands of possibilities and just as many ways of describing them. Each is inventive; each commands attention. In his hands, people acquire depth. He reminds us that a person has many faces, exactly as each of us does in life. We are complicated and mutable. As time passes, what we understand changes too, and the novel captures that motion in the shifting inner lives of its characters. To express the deepest truth in the simplest language is no simple achievement. But why should the intricate beauty created by intricate language not be another literary choice worthy of admiration?
The structure of Sandalwood Death also opens a path toward philosophical reflection. Mo Yan once made this observation about the novel: along the road of life, every person, at different moments, will play the role of executioner, victim, or spectator. Brutal physical punishments have left the stage of history, yet even in today’s highly developed modern society, innumerable “tortures” that leave no wound on the body are inflicted every day. The torturer may be a friend, a colleague, or—more likely still—a family member. And we ourselves may have played that role.
Many of the novel’s executioners do not truly wish to hurt anyone. They have been forced to carry out orders from above; refusal would cost both their own life and the life of the person they were commanded to punish. Does Qian Ding truly want to arrest Sun Bing? Does Zhao Jia truly want to take up a life of killing? Does Sun Bing truly want to kill the Germans? I do not think so. If Qian Ding refuses to arrest Sun Bing, more innocent people will die. Zhao Jia is only trying to survive: while searching for his uncle, he stumbles onto the road that makes him a killer, and someone, after all, will always be made to do such work for the state. If Sun Bing’s wife and children had not died beneath German blades, would he still have fought the Germans to the death? I do not think there is a single answer.
History Is Cruel, but the Human Heart Is Warm
We have to admit that this event, which truly happened in history, is terrifying—something people would rather never speak of again. Innocent people lost their lives, and innocent land had its face disfigured by guns, artillery, and powder. Yet as I read, I also found a little warmth within the cruelty.
The person who left the deepest impression on me was Qian Ding, the magistrate of Gaomi. In the first half of the novel, I thought he was hateful. He destroyed Sun Bing’s beard and made it impossible for him to perform opera again; later, he personally arrested Sun Bing and handed him over to the Germans. Only as Mo Yan’s narrative continued did I come to see Qian Ding’s other side. To defend the interests of Gaomi’s people, he was willing to mount a horse himself and plead their case to his superiors. When the Germans faced Sun Bing with artillery, Qian Ding also had the courage to accept responsibility. He offered to capture Sun Bing personally, on the condition that the Germans cease their attack after the arrest—though they later continued slaughtering innocent villagers. At the end of the story, Qian Ding himself puts an end to the life of Sun Bing, who has been nailed to sandalwood and tortured beyond endurance. He brings Sun Bing’s pain and humiliation to an early end, and in doing so completely ruins the Germans’ scheme.
The other person is Qian Ding’s wife. At the final, decisive moment, she hides Meiniang beneath the bed, helps her escape the search, and saves her life. I do not want to give away too much, so I will leave it there.
A great novel must belong to a people, because the more deeply rooted it is in a people, the more fully it belongs to the world.
要政阳
August 30, 2026, Beijing