Massage

Bi Feiyu’s Massage is a novel centered on a group of blind massage therapists and winner of the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize. With delicate restraint, it portrays the lives, emotions, and dignity of the technicians at a blind massage center in Nanjing. Rather than treating the blind world as an object of curiosity, the author enters their perceptual systems and inner lives, showing how people with visual impairment build a distinctive and complete order of life through touch and hearing. The novel employs multiple perspectives: each therapist has an independent chapter, forming a group portrait in which individuals are sharply distinct yet interconnected. Bi Feiyu’s rendering of blind psychology is astonishing—his writing on the blind person’s concept of light, understanding of beauty, longing for love, and defense of dignity moves beyond physiological limitation to speak directly to universal human nature. The philosophical reflection on “seeing” and “not seeing” is especially profound: the sighted do not necessarily “see” the truth, while the blind may “see” the essence. This subversive thinking about modes of perception gives the novel literary weight beyond its subject matter. As an editor, I believe the value of this work lies not only in the social significance of its subject but also in how Bi Feiyu uses literary language to construct a perceptual universe parallel to the visual world, and how its characters navigate their joys and sorrows within that universe with astonishing resilience. Reading Massage will make you reconsider the boundary between “normal” and “disability,” and develop a new sensitivity to the tactile, auditory, and thermal dimensions of daily life that are often overlooked.