The Book of Death

The Book of Death is a novel by Li Ximin written in the 1990s. Within his own body of work it is regarded as his most important work of that decade and a key work marking his turn from regional writing toward "horror fiction." The novel is told from the perspective of a boy nicknamed Heizi who loses his father as a child: he moves with his mother to the foreign village of Shuiquliu, and with a child's eyes records the more than twenty deaths that occur one after another in this village in western Fujian—some absurd, some cruel, some almost silent, humble as the wild grass of the countryside and unheeded. The book consists of more than twenty chapters, each corresponding roughly to a manner of death and a family's hidden pain; the narratives are broken from one another yet loosely connected, like a self-enclosed, cyclical village chain. Li Ximin says most of these materials come from death stories he heard and witnessed in his youth, set in the countryside around the Cultural Revolution, and that he wanted to write "the horror of the peasant"—not ghosts or monsters, but how poverty, ignorance, violence, disease, and the pressures of the times push individuals toward their end. Scholar Zhu Dake calls it "a genealogy of Hakka death," "a chronology of Hakka life"; the novel thus differs from regional literature in the ordinary sense, confronting death with almost cold composure while leaving, in the cracks, the warmth and hardness of life. The book was first published in 2005 by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, and was reissued in 2011 by New World Press as one of the "Li Ximin Classics" series.