It's a collection of short stories by Pu Songling, which he wrote over the course of many years in the second half of the 17th Century. Many of the stories are based on folk tales, so I thought I'd give it a go because an earlier book I bought about Chinese folk tales didn't actually include any folk tales, just discussions of folk tales. As for why I wanted to read Chinese folk tales in the first place, well I'd just read a book of English folk tales and figured I should expand my horizons.
I have to say, they're certainly strange tales. Some have no discernable plot, and most are very short — half a page to two pages. A few are several pages longer, but not many. I was expecting something like The Decameron, but it wasn't like that at all. They're more like campfire tales, ending in either a precautionary warning or (more often) something amazing. Often, they start with something weird and end in an explanation in terms of the supernatural or of someone's strength of character (being clever, being fearless, that sort of thing).
Some tales are retellings of tales Pu had heard from friends, but others are original. Many include some kind of credit, mentioning from whom Pu heard them; in a number of cases, the people featured in the stories appear in historical records. That doesn't mean the stories are true, of course, and when you read them it's clear that the majority of them simply aren't. They're not meant to be, though: the sources add authenticity, but it is a work of fiction.
The author is famously lauded for his erudition, making many subtle references to ancient (or at least older) Chinese myths and stories while weaving his narratives. Even modern Chinese readers would have a hard time recognising many of these, because the target audience was well-educated men of rank who used a somewhat esoteric version of the language. In the translation I read, the most important of the allusions are explained in endnotes, which were interesting if not really adding much to the stories. Also in the endnotes were an occasional selection of comments made by people who had written about the collection in the past. They seem to see allegories everywhere, and in my view are usually over-reading. Sure, you can interpret some action as a Taoist homily, but you can interpret pretty well anything as a Taoist homily if you put your mind to it.
Some of the footnotes were longer than the stories.
As for what I learned about Chinese folk tales from this, well I was surprised by how many feature foxes. These are literal foxes, but they're also evil beings who take on human form and prey on innocents. This negative view of them seems to have been the default opinion of the target audience, so whenever the foxes turn out to be good, rather than evil, it's treated as being unexpected. Sadly, because I'm not particularly anti-fox myself, I wasn't quite as shocked as the mandarins of 1780 would have been when the fox in a tale didn't turn out to want to suck the life out of people — although a good many of them did, of course, usually because their victim fell under their spell. The good foxes weren't just good, though, they were super-good, always dutiful and devoted (if female) or excellent company (if male). Also, although it might have been unexpected for the original readers to learn that a beautiful young woman was in fact a fox, this revelation happened so many times that it was refreshing when a beautiful woman turned out not to be a fox (she was usually a ghost instead, but occasionally something else such as a bee or the daughter of a god).
Interestingly from my point of view, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio shares similarities with my book, Dheghōm, except that its tales are all written in the same voice and they don't come together to form a narrative. It was an interesting and at times entertaining read, anyway, even if it did become a bit samey by the end.
Overall, I quite enjoyed it.
