Two Hearts

Two Hearts is a long tale of the strange, about sixty thousand characters, by the writer and screenwriter Song Fangjin. The story evolved from the tale of Qin Jubo Fighting a Ghost in volume 16 of In Search of the Supernatural, which runs to fewer than three hundred characters. Rereading In Search of the Supernatural, the author discovered that the story's setting, Langya, was his own hometown of Jiaonan in Shandong, and so he rewrote and expanded this ancient tragedy of human relations against that background. The story takes place in Qin Family Village at the foot of Dazhu Mountain in Jiaonan. Qin Jubo inherits the family's immortal-catching skill and makes his living hunting yellow weasels, respectfully called Great Immortal Huang among the people; he is now sixty. He is the head of the household, highly respected at home but sparing of words, with little verbal exchange with his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson; outside, he drinks and chats with his in-law Li Si, but their acquaintance is casual and not intimate. Around one Mid-Autumn Festival, for certain reasons he becomes the sworn enemy of a white-furred yellow weasel about to become an immortal, White Azalea, and man and weasel engage in decades of struggle and wit, finally leading to the tragedy in which he mistakenly kills his own grandson. The second half of the novel shifts to White Azalea's perspective, looking back on this feud and on Qin Jubo's lonely life, forming a dual-perspective, mirror-like structure in which human and animal reflect each other. The book also includes such inherited treasures as the Two-Hearts Pot and the Heart-Linking Clasp, and depicts village markets, food, folk beliefs, and other local details. Through the image of one pot holding two kinds of liquor, the work speaks of the barriers between people, the failure of communication, and the darkness of the human heart, and has been called a new-school tale of the strange. This volume is the standalone edition of the book.