A female novelist “specialising in beastly tales” writes a column for the Yong’an paper in which she tells the stories of the different breeds of beasts living in the city alongside humans, often undistinguishable from them. In nine chapters – each of which can be read as a self-contained short story – the protago- nist focusses on a beast of a specific kind, whose information she often collects from the colourful range of characters she comes in contact with during the nights she spends drinking at the Dolphin Bar. Many of those characters are beasts themselves, and she ends up “taming” them and getting romantically in- volved until their beastly nature prevails and those relationship prove impossible. Each individual story is held together by a bigger narrative following the protagonist’s own search for her roots, which are inex- tricably linked to the history of the beasts.
Fifty or sixty years prior the story, Yong’an had a great many beasts, and human beings were just one breed amongst them, until war broke out and people battled the beasts driving many of them to extinc- tion. The sorrowful beasts were one of the few surviving tribes and became the most populous one in Yong’an. The first chapter focusses on them as the protagonist hears the story of a female painter friend’s romance with one of such beasts who died mysteriously despite not having smiled (smiling is the only cause of death for sorrowful beasts). When the beast’s supposed sister – who had mysteriously ap- peared at the painter’s doorsteps – dies as well, the painter is irresistibly drawn to her corpse, whose mere sighting causes her instant death. It turns out that Lefty the painter had been previously eaten alive by the male beast she had been in love with: on nights when the moon is full, the male specimen is able to mate with a human woman, “and at the moment of greatest pleasure, he opens his green belly-mouth wide and swallows her whole. He then takes on her likeness, slowly digesting her consciousness, finally becoming a new female beast, and so reproducing, generation after generation”.
Next come the joyous beasts, not divided into male and female, immortal auspicious creatures who take the form of a phoenix, but cannot survive long on their own, hence they spend most of their existence as a parasite in a human host, especially children. “When everything in the body has been eaten – the or- gans, the muscles, the brain, the blood – it leaves through the (exceptionally) long left arm, transforming into an enormous bird, a creature of awesome beauty that can only live a single night. The joyous beast reproduces through death. A feather from its head finds a new body to latch onto, and once lodged there, will gestate a new being. From death into life, and so for thousands of years.” Originally trained as a zoologist, and the favourite student of the most talented university professor in the whole of China, the protagonist, is an incredibly smart enfant terrible who ended up never graduating but turned to writing fiction instead. She is a tough, dry-humoured woman of unspecified age but most likely in her late twen- ties or maybe thirties despite her often-self-deprecating jokes about her being “a spinster” or an “old lady” compared to other male characters and the rough lifestyle reminiscent of the typical jaded private eye in his fifties. She has a love-hate relationship with her former university professor who is a men- tor/Charlie-from-Charlie’s-Angels figure giving her clues regarding her investigations on the beasts, but is also quite tough on her and fairly elusive, as when they’re supposed to meet he always sends his new “fa- vourite student” instead: the charming Zhong Liang (the heir of an extremely powerful family), whom the protagonist initially describes as “the professor’s latest lapdog” but grows fonder and fonder of and throughout the chapter, he gets an increasingly prominent role in the story. (Firstly as in chapter five, “Flourishing Beasts”, Zhong Liang’s jeweller uncle falls in love with the protagonist and he acts as a middleman, secondly as Zhong Liang becomes more and more involved with the writer and the two de- velop a romantic relationship, with him taking care of her after she gets stabbed during a mysterious mugging.) In the early chapters, the writer relies a lot on her friend Charley, a busybody turned private eye who’s often dating female beasts and later will turn out to be a beast himself. In this second chapter on joyous beasts, Charley is investigating the disappearance of Li Chun, an old woman looking like the lover of the mayor of Yong’an fifty year ago, except for a mole beneath her right eye. It turns out that inside Li Chun’s body there was a joyous beast who devoured her from within for fifty years, eventually soaring over the city taking the shape of a phoenix.
