In some cases King Yama orders his underlings to research the relevant
files before reaching a verdict, and in one case he even visits the world of light in order to make up his mind—when he has met a farmer who curses mice
and rats for the damages they cause (the owner of the cat that had been summoned to the underworld), all his doubts are removed:
When King Yama had left the Yama hall,
His eyes looked in all directions, his ears listened all around:
When listening, his ears distinguished good and bad,
When watching, his eyes made very clear distinctions.
On his road he passed by a large field of wheat,
The earth was covered by ears, was covered by stalks.
A large group of rats was occupied stealing the grain,
But when they saw King Yama, they hid in their holes.
On his road be passed by the house of a farmer.
A large group of rats had climbed up the beams.
They entered between the tiles, hid above the poles,
So the tiles were clattering with quite a noise.
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In front of the house the farmer started to rant,
“Damn your sire and damn your dame!
If my cat hadn’t been killed by god knows who,
How could you enjoy yourselves like this?”
When King Yama heard him talking this way,
He quickly stepped forward and said to him,
“I hear you are talking about mice and cats,
Please compare the merits of both animals.”
Once the farmer heard this, he grew angry:
“What merit has a mouse that needs a reward?
Talking about merits of mice makes no sense,
Talk about their faults and they have plenty!
First of all they damage my granary by gnawing,
Secondly they ruin my clothes by their chewing.
Thirdly they make their holes below our walls,
And fourthly they befoul the rice we’ve stored.
The mice sons and mice grandsons, the whole lot,
Use the planks of the loft as their training grounds.
At night it is such a racket a man cannot sleep—
As soon as you sleep they again pierce your ears.”
When King Yama heard this, he asked the question,
“What is the best method to subdue these rodents?
Should we apply presses? Beat them with cudgels?5
Or fill their holes with water and drown the bastards?”
When the farmer heard this, he replied as follows,
“None of these many methods is as good as a cat.
It is only a cat that has the required qualities,
Only a cat is capable of subduing those rats.
Now as soon as a mouse hears a cat meowing,
It’s so scared its legs collapse, its heart shakes.
And as soon as a mouse is spotted by the cat,
It’s bound to die and meet with King Yama.”6
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ch a p t e r 4
In still other cases the mouse seals its fate in court by damaging King
Yama’s possessions, either his royal paraphernalia or the cloth that covers the table behind which he is seated.
And when the mouse is sentenced to eternal torture and the cat is ordered
to keep up its good work, King Yama additionally may grant the cat the pri-
vilege to sleep with young girls:
Turning around he thereupon addressed the cat,
“I ennoble you as a most meritorious vassal!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I allow you to doze during daytime on the stove,
And at night to sleep with a girl in her bedroom.”
And if you my audience don’t believe my words,
Just think,
Which little cutie doesn’t love her cat?7
Pr equels: Cr eation and Pride
Other performers and authors expanded the narrative by providing a prequel.
It is quite common in Chinese storytelling to start a tale with a quick survey of Chinese history up to the period in which the tale to be told is set. Some adaptations of the underworld court case of the mouse against the cat even
start from the moment of creation:
In the beginning, imagine,
There was no sun or moon
And heaven and earth were one chaos:
Streams were linked to hills,
Heaven was linked to earth,
And there were no humans about.
First the Three Thearchs
Arranged and settled
The sun and moon and the stars;
Next the Five Sovereigns
Arranged and settled
The sprouts of the five grains.
Now there was a heaven,
And there was an earth,
But there still were no humans,
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Until on a river
There floated down
A white-haired man of the Way.
There was a threesome
Who put on a human skin
And came down to settle the earth:
The people call them
The ancestral masters,
A threesome of brother and sisters.
The brother and sisters
Were husband and wives
But their feelings were unfriendly,
And the Old Lord Li
Had to intervene
And serve as their matchmaker.
Only so were later
Born to these parents
A hundred sons and daughters,
Who proliferated into
The one hundred families
That still are around today.
When the poet and cultural cadre Wang Yaping (1905–1983) quoted this
introduction in 1949, he showcased it as an example of the “poison of superstition” that performers in the New China would have to avoid from now on
“because it denies the viewpoint that labor had created mankind.”8 An adap-
tation of the underworld court case of the mouse against the cat as a “big-
drum book” ( dagushu) from Henan, performed by Mo Hongmei in 2006,
also starts with the moment of creation, but in this case the unwilling brother and sister couple do not need to have sex in order to create humans because they succeed in forming men and women from clay. From there the performance jumps to the scenes of the cat killing a mouse and the mouse appealing to King Yama.9
A modern folk song from Linqu (in Shandong) begins with a bitter com-
plaint by the mouse against the powers of creation that condemned it to
permanent want:
In the first watch / as the moon rose above the hills,
One tiny little mouse was all awash in tears.
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e r 4
You’d like to know why this mouse was so sad?
It had no food in its belly, its heart was so sour!
“I really hate Earth / and I really hate Heaven,
King Yama has done his job in an unfair fashion!
He may have granted me life, but I have no food,
So I steal some at night and all people despise me.
If I have no food / that still is not a big problem,
But my parents and children are yelling and screaming.
My white-haired old mother has tears in her eyes,
And my father, who’s eighty, is crying without end!
My grandsons are hollering that they are hungry,
My granddaughters are so starved they don’t move.
My wife is so starved she is only a bag of bones,
And I’m so starved I can barely stand on my legs.
From all sides considered, there is no other way
But to secretly go outside and have a peek and see
Whether I can steal some food to save my family—
It’s really hard for a little mouse to make a living!”10
In a closely related folk song from Linyi, the mouse complains that Heaven
and Earth also created the cat:
In the first watch, when the sun had sunk behind the hills,
A little mouse was overwhelmed by feelings of distress.
He carried a grudge against Earth, and against Heaven,
He carried a grudge against the partiality of King Yama:
“As you have assigned us mice to live in the human realm,
Why did you also allow the cat to live in the world of light?
A cat is born with a head that from birth is enormous;
Jumping and pounding, its martial skills are complete.
It controls us during the day and also during the night,
And it fills us at every hour with fear and trepidation.”
It cried out: “You damned cat, your heart is too cruel,
Since which generation did we contract this feud with you?
You kill one generation of us and then the next generation;
You do away with us one time and then again another time.
You have killed old and young, never to be reunited again;
You have killed our sons and grandsons, now forever apart!”11
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The Precious Scroll of the Mouse (Laoshu baojuan) from western Gansu opens with the brave attempts of two young mice, stirred by tales of the
former glory of their race, to take revenge for the death of their father, who had died of rat poison.12
As a rule, the prequels tend to strengthen our initial sympathy for the little mouse, but in a few cases they present the animal in a less positive light. The version as a “pure song” ( qingqu) from Yangzhou, for instance, starts out with a dialogue between a mouse and a rat about their high status, easy life, and great power:
Come to talk of us mice,
we are very renowned!
From the beginning of time
right down to today!
Of the twelve birth-year animals
we are counted most lofty.
Our many subsequent ancestors
have greatly displayed their might.
One met with the Monk of the Tang
on his Journey to the West,
And battled in magic with Acolyte Sun—
the match ended in a draw.
The Heavenly King who supports a Pagoda—
he is our father,13
And Crown Prince Nezha
we can call our brother!
The Five Rats by their transformations
created havoc in the Eastern Capital,
Even when Judge Bao gave his verdict,
he could not distinguish true from false.
He used the Precious Mirror for Unmasking Demons
to display our original form,
And reported to the Jade Emperor,
who dispatched heavenly soldiers and gods.
Those subdued our ancestors,
but many descendants remained!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We also have many benefits,
but people don’t know of them.
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The whiskers of a mouse made into a brush
can write poetry and prose,
“A rat’s eyes” and “a rat’s ears”
are listed in handbooks of physiognomy.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But the secret name of “rat” is also widely known.
We live in out-of-the-way places
and hide ourselves in holes.
Above us we have our parents,
below us we have our children.
Each year on the fifteenth of the First Month
the young brides leave their home,
And whispering and muttering,
the marriages are concluded.
The neighbors to the left and right
bring rouge and powder as presents.
Our only problem is our landlord,
a mean-spirited sycophant!
He will give his presents to others,
but he never gives them to us!
He does not treat us properly,
So we pester him till he’s never at ease.
We have our fights in the Buddha shrine,
so the candlesticks will fall over,
We have our horse races on the beams,
raising our arms and displaying our troops,
And we take a leak on the mosquito curtains above the bed,
dripping till he’s wet all over.
The wax candles in the lantern shade—
we gnaw them through till their very center,
The paintings on paper by famous masters—
we tear them to pieces,
His clothes and silks—
all suffer a plague!
In the boxes for fruits
we open a back door,
So we can go in and out at will,
eating as tigers, gobbling like wolfs.
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Whether it rains or snows,
we are not concerned at all:
Cotton floss and rice straw
are sufficient to ward off the cold.
Come to think of it,
Which animal in the world can even come near to a mouse?14
But as soon as a cat appears, the mouse and the rat flee the scene, and while the latter escapes, the mouse is killed.
Pr equels: The Cr ashed Wedding
The introductions we discussed above all take the enmity of the mouse and
the cat for granted. Some authors of adaptations, however, feel a need to
explain why the mouse felt such a hatred for the cat that it would even go so far as to accuse the cat of murder in the underworld. To do so, some adaptations start out with an account of the cat crashing the wedding of the mouse.
The most elaborate of these is A Tale without Shape
or Shadow, to be discussed later in this chapter. Another example is the long ballad performed by Li
Kejin (1938–2006) from Fangxian in northwestern Hubei. His version also
contains a stanza in which mother mouse provides her daughter with some
useful advice when she has learned that the family of the groom has set the date for fetching the bride:
The mother mouse
Pondered this matter
And heaved a heavy sigh.
Then she called
Her young daughter,
“Now listen carefully,
Your mother has
Something to say,
She wants to tell you.15
Your mother-in-law’s family
Asked the matchmaker
To come over and tell us the date:
The twenty-fourth
Of the Final Month
They want to come and fetch you.
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