The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas

By Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas

(2001, translated 2015) 

Grove Press

The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas by Yan Lianke includes The Years, Months, Days and Marrow.  There is a fable-like quality to the former, in which an elderly man volunteers to remain as a solitary protector of a village suffering a natural disaster. The desert has encroached on the village for years; when a drought kills every crop in the field and the farm animals die of thirst, the villagers abandon the site and walk into the distance. The seventy-two-year-old Elder reasons that he would not survive the days-long march and vows to watch over the village until it is safe for the citizens to return. His needs are simple. He immediately sets himself to the task of keeping the last remaining corn plant alive. But how can he save the plant when he can barely save himself? Already starving, he soon exhausts his small jar of grain. When he discovers his only companion, a forsaken dog, is getting fat on rats, he reasons that they must be finding food somewhere. He decides to use keys and windows to enter the abandoned buildings, hoping to find hidden stores of grain. Though he searches attics and hiding places in homes, barns, and shacks, he can find only a few grains here and there. As his hunger mounts, he hallucinates and falls into a coma-like state, but he persists. He eventually makes a careful study of the rats, research that affords him some hope. This tale of the Elder’s heroic sacrifice earned Yan Lianke the Lu Xun prize; it is also cherished by many Chinese as a heartwrenching and surprisingly humorous portrayal of the Chinese spirit. Marrow opens on an altogether different note. In a mountain village lives Fourth Wife, the matriarch of a family of disabled daughters. She blames the condition of her mentally challenged children on her poor choice of husband. Through Olympian efforts, Fourth Wife succeeds in finding physically disabled men from distant villages and negotiates pragmatic marriages for her first two daughters. But the Fourth Wife has a more significant burden. First and Second daughters were skilled enough to at least sew on a button or count as high as ten, and they knew enough to bow before a man. The third Daughter, however, can not compete and she too suffers from seizures. How will Fourth Wife discover a family foolish enough to join itself to this valueless daughter and doomed bloodline?

He said, Blindy, do you think our corn seedling will bud again? The dog stopped licking his hand, then nodded. He asked, Will it bud tonight, or tomorrow? I’m sleepy. Dont nod, because I can’t see you anyway. Just answer me – do you think it will bud tomorrow, or tonight? The elder leaned against the she wall and closed his eyes, and the darkness covered his face like a piece of wet gauze. He stopped caressing the dog’s back, and his hand came to rest on the dog’s head as he fell asleep.