Tidings

Messages is a long-form notebook-style novel that Jia Pingwa published after turning seventy, brought out by People's Literature Publishing House in September 2025. The book consists of more than ninety short pieces that stand alone yet echo one another, opening in the Jin-Shaan Gorge of the Yellow River and extending along the Wei River, the Yellow River, and other waterways to the Jingshan, Cuo'e, and Wenbi Peak areas north of the Guanzhong Plain, while also touching on villages and markets in northern and southern Shaanxi and in Gansu, Shanxi, Henan, and Shandong. The work continues the tradition of ancient Chinese notebook fiction in its "recording of people" and "recording of the strange," and also inherits the methods of local gazetteer writing: ferrymen at river crossings, hermits in the mountains, idlers in the marketplace, and solitary dwellers in old villages all take shape under a brush that claims to be "a true record of actual visits"; ancient pagodas, old trees, rivers, wolf legends, temple fairs, paper-cutting, and funeral customs interweave, as the imaginary and the real, people and things, regard one another within the same space. The title is taken from the meaning of "the breath of heaven and the respiration of earth," and the epigraph "A hundred grasses surge upward, all living things exchange messages" sets out the book's central theme: to see the brevity of life and the eternity of nature together, and to treat the ceaseless "breath" of life on earth as the message truly worth recording. More than twenty ink paintings made by the author during his travels are included at the front and back of the book, text and image serving as outer and inner aspects of each other, so critics often call it, alongside Records of the Qinling Mountains, another contemporary "mountain dwelling picture."