China's most outrageous character--the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters--returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary's body in chapter 61 of Journey to the West from which The Tower of Myriad Mirrors takes off..
After a nod to Journey's storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey's quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important link in the development of the Chinese novel and window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a fascinating read.
Description:
China's most outrageous character--the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters--returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary's body in chapter 61 of Journey to the West from which The Tower of Myriad Mirrors takes off..
After a nod to Journey's storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey's quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important link in the development of the Chinese novel and window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a fascinating read.