The Seventh Day

The Seventh Day is a novel by Yu Hua following his earlier work Brothers, published by New Star Press in June 2013 and running to around 130,000 Chinese characters. It opens with an absurd premise: "As the thick fog closed in, I stepped out of my rented room... The place I was heading to was called the crematorium—that was its current name; in the past it had been called the funeral parlor." The narrator, Yang Fei, is already dead. He has been notified to report to the crematorium before nine in the morning, with his cremation scheduled for nine-thirty. Structured around the Chinese mourning custom of "the first seventh," the novel unfolds across seven chapters, "Day One" through "Day Seven," chronicling Yang Fei's wanderings and encounters in the seven days after death. At the crematorium, he sees that even in death there are VIP sections and ordinary sections, imported furnaces and domestic ones. Along the way, he is reunited with his ex-wife Li Qing, recalling how they met, married, and were driven apart by poverty and desire. He revisits his own origins—how he was found as an infant between the rails by Yang Jinbiao, a railway switchman, and raised by him—and how his adoptive father quietly slipped away so as not to be a burden, dying far from home. He also meets Liu Mei, known as "Mouse Girl," Wu Chao, and other young people struggling at the bottom of city life, along with a host of others who died from forced demolitions, medical malpractice, and wrongful convictions. All these souls with no graves to call their own ultimately gather in "the land of no burial"—a place without wealth or rank, where people love and care for one another. Blending journalistic material from real life with a Kafkaesque absurdity, Yu Hua compresses the absurdity, indifference, and pain of contemporary society into seven days, while leaving room in this "book of the dead" for warmth and the possibility of redemption.