The Ghost Who Kept Her Lover Alive on Purpose / 鬼妇话别

A five-year affair, a window left open, and the night the woman laughed and let her hair down

From Notes from the Thatched Study (阅微草堂笔记), Volume X — Rushi Wowen IV (如是我闻四)

By Ji Yun (纪昀, 1724–1805) · Translated with annotations

Hook. She always came every seven or eight days. Never on consecutive nights, never twice in one week. He thought her husband was watching. The night he told her he had to leave the province, she laughed and explained that the schedule had nothing to do with her husband.

The Story

This story comes from Chen Banjiang (陈半江, a friend of Ji Yun's who collected anecdotes about scholars and recluses).

There was a young scholar — Chen never gave his name — who, one bright moonlit night, met a woman in the lane near his lodging. She was strikingly beautiful. He said something to her, the kind of soft, indirect line a man uses when he is hoping to be invited closer; and she, to his surprise, accepted him at once. She would not say her family name. She would only tell him that she lived nearby. Her husband, she said, was often away from home for days at a time. There was a back window that could be opened, and a gap in the wall that could be crossed; whenever there was an opening, she would come. She could not promise a fixed schedule.

In practice the schedule turned out to be remarkably regular. She came every seven or eight days. Never on consecutive nights. Never twice in one week. He sometimes joked with her about this, asking whether her husband was watching her that closely. She would smile and change the subject.

This went on for five or six years. They became very attached to each other. He kept the back window propped open at night. She kept coming.

Then his employment changed, and he had to follow his patron to a distant province. He told her on a Wednesday evening, when she came through the wall. She did not cry. She sat very quietly. He, on the other hand, could not get the words out. He kept trying to tell her we will write, we will arrange something, we will find a way — and his voice kept breaking. By the third attempt he was choking on the words and his eyes were full of tears, and he was, frankly, embarrassing himself.

She watched him for a long while. Then she did something strange. She laughed.

It was not a cruel laugh. It was the laugh of someone who has held a small secret for a long time and is finally setting it down.

"My dear," she said, "if you go on being this much in love with me, you will fall ill with longing and die of it. That is not why I started coming to you. Let me tell you the truth.

I am a gui (a ghost — one of those restless dead in old Chinese stories who can't quite move on)^{[1]Gui (鬼) — the general Chinese term for a spirit of the unburied or restless dead. In Qing-era folk belief, a gui was neither immaterial nor symbolic — it was understood as a perfectly real being, carrying a residue of the personality the person had in life, occupying the world along the seams between yang (the living world) and yin (the underworld). The most common cause for a soul to become a gui was a violent or unjust death; the most common cause for it to stay a gui was being unable to find a substitute.}, and I have been waiting for a substitute^{[2]The "waiting for a substitute" (待替 dài tì) belief was one of the load-bearing structures of Qing supernatural lore. Ghosts of those who died wrongly — by drowning, by hanging, by murder — were said to be unable to move on to reincarnation until they caused a living person to die in the same way, who would then take their place in the cycle and let them advance. A drowning ghost waited at a river to pull someone under. A hanged ghost waited near rafters. A ghost who had died from sexual depletion (or simply a hungry yin spirit) waited to find a living lover. The terror of dài tì was not just that ghosts wanted to hurt you — it was that they had to. Ji Yun's ghost in this story is the rare gui who has the appetite for substitution and chooses, for five years, not to act on it.}. Every human who lies with a ghost falls ill, and most of them die. The yin in us strips the yang out of them^{[3]Yin and yang in the body — Qing medical and supernatural thought treated yáng (阳, the bright, warm, active principle) as something a healthy human accumulated and a ghost was missing. A gui, being all yīn (阴), was understood to drain yang from any living body it came close to — not as malice but as a physical fact, the way cold water draws heat from a hand. Sexual contact accelerated the transfer. The ghost in this story explicitly invokes the medical theory: yīn bō yáng, the yin strips the yang. Her seven-or-eight-day cycle is not a romantic gesture — it is a clinical observation about how long the human body needs to replenish.}. That is the rule.

But I loved how clean and handsome you were. I could not bear to break a piece of jade or wilt an orchid. So I made myself a rule: I would only come back after seven or eight days had passed, so that your yang would have time to recover. There is a stripping, and then there is a restoring. That is why you have been all right.

If you had taken up with any other ghost in my position, she would have come every night, every other night, whenever she wanted. Half a year from now your friends would be picking up your bones at the dried-fish market^{[4]"The dried-fish market" (枯鱼之肆 kūyú zhī sì) — an idiom drawn from the Zhuangzi, where a fish trapped in a drying puddle complains that by the time help arrives, he will already be on sale at the market for dried fish. By Ji Yun's time the phrase meant dead, with the body already preserved for sale or burial — the bleakest and most ordinary way to refer to a corpse. The ghost's threat — they will look for you at the dried-fish market — is not theatrical. It is the everyday phrase a Qing reader would use for you will be dead within six months and your remains will be processed without ceremony.}. There are very many of us. There are very few of the kind I am. Watch yourself.

You loved me well, and I am repaying you. That is what this five years was."

When she finished speaking she stood up. She let her hair down out of its pins so that it fell loose around her face. She opened her mouth and pushed her tongue out long, in the way ghosts in Chinese stories are said to do when they finally show what they are. And then she gave one long, sharp wailing cry, and was gone.

The scholar shook for a long time. He went to the distant province. He worked. He came home, eventually, when he was older. He did not become a monk, and he did not stop being a man — but for the rest of his life, whenever a strikingly beautiful stranger smiled at him in the lane, he turned his face and walked on without a second glance.

Translator's Reflection

The first time I read this story I thought it was about the ending — the hair coming down, the tongue, the wail. That is the image Ji Yun puts last, and that is the image every Chinese reader remembers when they remember this story. But on the second reading I realized that the ending is not the point. The point is the seven or eight days.

Most ghost-lover stories in the classical tradition follow a pretty fixed shape. The man meets the woman. They fall in love. He gets thin and pale. By the end of the story he is dead, or saved at the last minute by a Daoist with a sword. The ghost is either innocent and tragic (she did not know she was killing him) or knowing and cruel (she knew and did not care). Either way, the story is about the man's body wearing out.

Ji Yun's ghost is doing math. She knows the rule. She knows that one night with a ghost strips a measurable amount of yang from a man. She knows that yang regenerates if you give the body time. So she budgets him. She gives him a week to recover. She comes back. She gives him another week. Five years of this, and he is still healthy.

The reason this hit me on the second reading is that it is the first time I have seen the taking and the giving in a ghost story treated as a kind of accounting problem the ghost herself is solving. She is not a victim of her own nature. She is not a predator who happened to fall in love. She is a creature with a known appetite and an instinct for restraint. The restraint is what she is offering him in place of the substitute soul she was supposed to be taking.

The thing I keep turning over is her last line: there are very many of us. There are very few of the kind I am. Watch yourself. Read one way, it is a warning about ghosts. Read another way, it is one of the bleaker descriptions of love I have come across in a Qing text. She is telling him: most people who want something from you will take everything you have. I made a different choice for you. You will not get this lucky twice.

The wail at the end, then, is not the ghost dropping the mask. It is the ghost letting him see her, all at once, after five years of being polite. She is saying: this is what I am, this is what I have been choosing not to do, and now I am going. Take it seriously.

The scholar, to his credit, does take it seriously. The story does not say he became a virtuous man. It only says that for the rest of his life he did not look at beautiful strangers. There is, in that one line, the entire weight of what just happened to him.

Next tale: To be announced — drawn from one of six classical Chinese collections in rotation. → Coming next week.