Six essays on Pu Songling’s 聊斋志异 and the playable version of it: what kind of book roughly five hundred short tales add up to, what really happens in Painted Skin, whether this book’s foxes and ghosts are monsters or the love interest, why one of its stories has been filmed over and over since 1960, where its most quoted sentence actually comes from, and the handful of characters its stories keep casting. The 1880 English translation is free; the game is over here.
Nearly five hundred short tales, not a novel. The translator who gave English its version kept 164 of them, threw the rest away, and said so in his introduction.
September 12, 2026 · 8 min read
Modern versions make the demon a woman wronged into monstrosity. Pu Songling gives her no history and no excuse, and the scholar who took her in never gets a warning he is willing to hear.
September 12, 2026 · 8 min read
Search for what fox spirits are and the internet hands you a monster. Open Pu Songling and the fox marries the household's useless son and improves him.
September 12, 2026 · 8 min read
A scholar lodges at a derelict temple, a ghost is sent to kill him, the swordsman next door is not what he says. Almost nobody who has watched a version has read the six pages.
September 12, 2026 · 9 min read
Ask what the most quoted line from Pu Songling is and the English-language internet has no settled answer. The line people do carry away is in the front matter, about himself.
September 12, 2026 · 7 min read
Read twenty of these tales in a row and you start recognising the cast before the plot arrives. The names change every time and the parts do not.
September 12, 2026 · 9 min read