Strange Tales

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.

A solitary scholar swears he fears neither fox nor ghost. Then two women begin visiting his lamplit room — one warm, one cold — and each insists the other is quietly killing him. To live, he must learn which of the women who love him is not entirely alive.

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.

A pampered young man from an old family climbs Lao Mountain to study with an immortal, then balks at the chores. When he finally bullies the master into teaching him one trick, he learns the cost of wanting magic without the work behind it. Pure Pu Songling.

When the Ming throne grows fond of cricket fights, a whole county is taxed in insects. A struggling village clerk is conscripted to supply one, on pain of a flogging — and as the deadline closes in, the hunt for a single champion cricket comes to cost him his savings, his peace, and nearly his only son.

A scholar stares too long at a temple mural — at one loose-haired maiden in particular — and finds himself on the other side of the plaster. What happens there is real enough. Whether any of it matters is the monk's problem to explain.

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 stranded scholar befriends a fox family hiding in a borrowed mansion. The youngest daughter heals him with a kiss's worth of medicine. He loves her; she is promised to another. What comes after — loyalty, thunder, death, and a resurrection — is harder to name than love.

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.

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 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.