Pu Songling of Zichuan wrote these tales over decades. His preface, dated 1679, says he set down whatever he heard and friends mailed him more. Like the exiled Song poet at Huangzhou, he loves to hear people talk of ghosts. He calls the result a book of ‘solitary indignation’.
There are nearly five hundred of them in twelve volumes, some barely a paragraph long and some several pages. A fox girl moves in with a lonely student; a ghost lodges in a ruined temple; a Daoist teaches a trick that works exactly once; an examinee is summoned to the underworld and passes its exam for the post of city god. The people in them are scholars, farmers, magistrates, thieves and widows, and the supernatural always arrives through an ordinary door.
Many tales close with a comment from ‘the Historian of the Strange’, Pu’s own voice, dry or angry or tender. The collection was first printed in 1766, half a century after he died.
