Books: Wind & Moon Play

FLOWER SHADOWS BEHIND THE CURTAIN (432 pp.)—Translated from the Chinese by Franz Kuhn and from the German by Vladimir Kean—Pantheon ($6).

In the 12th century, according to the bawdy Chinese classic. Chin P’ing Mei, there lived a rich and lustful man named Hsi Men. When this libertine wished to indulge in what is delicately called wind and moon play,

No maid of high or low degree Was safe from his unbridled lechery. Within his house, upon his maids And servants’ wives he preyed. Until he fell into the error Of thinking that his mortal shell would last forever.

Hsi Men’s mortal shell finally cracked from overexposure to wind and moon, and he died at 33.

Chin P’ing Mei ends Hsi Men’s story here. But a sequel, possibly by the same author (who may be the famed 16th century scholar and statesman Wang Shih Cheng), describes how the scoundrel’s virtuous widow, Moon Lady, and her infant son suffer for Hsi Men’s egregious gong-kicking. The work is Ko Lien Hua Ying, or Flower Shadows Behind the Curtain, translated into German by Sinologist Franz Kuhn and now passed on to English readers, fire-bucket fashion, by Translator Vladimir Kean. The result, somewhat surprisingly, is wry and readable.

The saintly Moon Lady, separated from her pious young son by invading Tartars, is hustled offstage before she can become tiresome. Her place is taken by a crew of thieves, usurers, pimps and powder faces (prostitutes) who add up to a kind of road-company Decameron. The fat lecher Pi, for instance, lusts after the beautiful Silver Vase, a pubescent virgin being carefully tended by Lady Li, a flower-garden proprietor (brothelkeeper). Cash-and-Carry, a young wastrel, volunteers to act as go-between, but what he goes between are Silver Vase’s sheets. Lady Li, who has been giving Cash-and-Carry a private course in flower arrangement, is outraged, and so is Pi. The lovers escape on a passing junk, but fall afoul of pirates.

In the end, of course, virtuous Moon Lady is restored to her riches and reunited with her son. But as the author probably intended, what the reader remembers is more likely to be the song of the low-living and unrepentant beggar Ying:

Forty years I wasted in houses of public

vice, Sipping human honey like a bee, playing

dice. Now that I am old and weary, I would

fain Midst whores and gamblers evermore

remain.