Redemption

A poor scholar and a merchant's daughter fall in love through exchanged poems — never properly meeting, never allowed to marry. When she dies and he follows her into the underworld, love turns out to be stronger than the afterlife's bureaucracy.

A penniless traveler shelters in a crumbling temple where the other lodgers keep turning up dead by morning, a small hole bored in the sole of one foot. Then the loveliest girl he has ever seen comes to his door after dark, offering herself, and a bar of gold.

Xi Fangping's father dies cursing the rich neighbor who bribed hell's guards to beat him. Xi decides to go down there himself and plead the case — only to find that hell's courts are bought just as cheaply as the living ones.

A redemption romance that inverts the tragedy. The courtesan Li Wa ruins a smitten young nobleman, who falls to singing funeral dirges for coppers and freezing in the streets — then she takes him back, nurses him whole, and drives him to pass the imperial exams. Bai Xingjian's tale of a woman who undoes her own damage.