Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales and Commentary.

• Author: Moyer, Jessica
• Position: Book review

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales and Commentary. Translated and introduced by WILT L. IDEMA. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2019. Pp. xvii + 254. $30.

The delightfully eclectic Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature centers on the legend of the underworld court case of the cat and the mouse. The book contains four translations of different versions of the legend and stories related to it, ranging from four to twenty-two pages in length and dating from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries: The Execution of the Five Rats, from the novel One Hundred Court Cases; the Mutual Accusations of the Cat and the Mouse, a brief prose parody of the case file genre; the Scroll of the Accusation of the Mouse against the Cat, appended to a baojuan or precious scroll manuscript; and the prosimetric narrative A Tale without Shape or Shadow. The last is a particularly valuable contribution to scholars, since the original text is only preserved in a variety of manuscript editions. Around the central theme of the cat-mouse conflict is arrayed a broad selection of heterogeneous material relating to cats and mice in Chinese culture. The book is sprinkled with translations of poems, ranging from the Odes' "Big Rat" to light-hearted verse by late imperial scholars in praise of their pet cats. There are also summaries of and translated excerpts from both scholarly treatises and popular narratives about cats and mice. Idema's analysis weaves this varied body of material together and explains the connections and divergences within it. The book ends with a chapter examining transformations of cat and mouse themes in literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--both recent adaptations of the folktales discussed in previous chapters and modern novels featuring cats and mice. The introduction and epilogue frame the Mouse vs. Cat legend specifically, and Chinese literature on animals generally, in the context of analogous texts and genres in world literature, from the Hellenistic Batrachomyomachia to the Persian Conference of Birds and the South Asian Panchatantra.

Mouse vs. Cat presents the stories it contains as examples of anthropomorphism in literature, in which humans use animals to think about ourselves. Here, the mouse's underworld accusation of the cat invites hearers and readers to consider the nature of interspecies conflict and ofjustice itself (a point underscored by Haiyan Lee's eloquent foreword to the book). The moment is...