Comedy

Heaven cannot beat the monkey, so it tries to hire him — and learns the hard way that an immortal you cannot kill makes a very poor employee. He eats the peaches, drinks the wine, swallows the elixir, and dares the whole court of the sky to stop him. One being can.

Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.

A whole country without a single man, a river that conceives children straight from a cup of water, and two thirsty monks who drink before they ask. The only cure is guarded by an old enemy with a grudge — and that is the easy half of the trouble waiting in the capital.

A rich farmer has a son-in-law problem. The strapping young man who married his daughter three years back has turned out to be a long-snouted, big-eared monster who eats like a famine and has locked the bride away. The farmer wants him gone. The monk and the monkey are happy to oblige.

A river so heavy a feather sinks, and a monster wearing nine skulls who has eaten every pilgrim before this one. Two of the travelers can fight in water and one cannot, which turns out to be the whole problem — and the river will not be crossed by winning.

For once the monk begs his own meal instead of sending a disciple — and walks straight into a house of seven smiling women who are not women at all. By the time the monkey finds the trail, the only thing between his master and the cookpot is a pig with no shame and a monkey with too much pride.

A Daoist monk in rags asks a market merchant for a single pear. The merchant refuses — rudely, repeatedly. So the monk borrows a pip from a stranger's charity, plants it in the road, and grows a pear tree on the spot. The crowd gets the fruit. The merchant gets the lesson.

A butcher heading home with nothing but bones finds two wolves on his trail. He throws, they follow, and when the bones run out he has to think fast. A tight little fable about what happens when cunning meets a man who is just as cunning — and has a cleaver.

A lovesick scholar tracks a girl into the mountains for the way she laughed at him on the road. He finds her, her strange old mother, and a household where no one will say what she is — or why she never, ever stops laughing.