Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

The Landlord and His Animal Lives

Ximen Nao is a landlord in Gaomi Township, Shandong Province—the region that appears in all of Mo Yan’s fiction—who is executed in 1950 as part of the land reform campaign that began the People’s Republic. He protests his innocence to the King of Hell: he was a good landlord, he treated his workers well, he does not deserve this. The King of Hell acknowledges his protest and offers what he presents as a mercy: Ximen Nao will be reincarnated on the very land he lost, as the animals who live and work there, until the karmic accumulation of his resentments is finally discharged.

The reincarnations proceed in order: first a donkey, then an ox, then a pig, then a dog, then a monkey, and finally—in a late section that breaks the pattern—a human child born with the memories of all his previous lives intact. Each incarnation covers a different period of Chinese history, and each animal’s perspective illuminates that period in ways that a human narrator could not achieve. As a donkey, Ximen Nao observes the earliest years of the collective farm; as an ox, the Great Leap Forward; as a pig, the Cultural Revolution; as a dog, the death of Mao and the early reform era. The animals are not allegories but actual animals—they experience hunger, fear, the hierarchy of the farmyard—and their perceptions of the human dramas playing out around them are simultaneously comic and devastating.

The Lan family, who farm the land Ximen Nao once owned, are the human constants across all the incarnations. Lan Lian, who refuses to join the collective and insists on farming as an individual peasant throughout the Maoist period, becomes a figure of almost mythic stubbornness: the man who simply would not. His choices, and their cost, are watched by Ximen Nao in one animal form after another, adding layers of irony that no omniscient human narrator could provide. The structural conceit is not merely clever; it is the argument.

Half a Century of China

Mo Yan’s subject across his career has been the history of Gaomi Township and, through it, the history of China in the twentieth century: the warlord period (Red Sorghum), the Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, the disasters of the Maoist years, the Reform era. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is his most comprehensive treatment, covering the full arc from 1950 to the early 2000s in a single narrative structure held together by Ximen Nao’s reincarnating consciousness.

The comparison to One Hundred Years of Solitude was made at the time of publication and is accurate in scope if not in tone. Both novels cover a century of history through a single family and a single place; both use magical realism as a way of incorporating historical events that naturalistic fiction would flatten into mere chronicle; both are ultimately about what survives political and natural catastrophe. But García Márquez’s Macondo moves toward oblivion, while Mo Yan’s Gaomi persists—the land is still there, the families are still there, the stories accumulate rather than conclude. Mo Yan’s temperament is more carnivalesque and less elegiac, more interested in the comedy of survival than in the tragedy of extinction.

The Great Leap Forward sequences, during which tens of millions of people starved while agricultural production statistics were fabricated and handed upward through the Party hierarchy, are rendered with a bitter irony that is the novel’s darkest register. An ox watching humans pretend the harvest is plentiful when the granaries are empty, watching the logic of a political system override the evidence of animal senses, is a more damning perspective than any human narrator could provide without being accused of propaganda. The animal vantage point is Mo Yan’s formal solution to the problem of how to bear witness to events that ideology insists on misrepresenting.

Mo Yan’s Nobel and His Best Work

Mo Yan received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, and the announcement was greeted with controversy—not about the quality of the work, which few disputed, but about his relationship to the Chinese Communist Party and his public statements defending censorship. He had signed a petition supporting Party control of publishing; he had made statements about Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment that were widely condemned. The Swedish Academy’s decision was criticized by Salman Rushdie and others as an endorsement of state repression.

Mo Yan’s response—that a writer in China must navigate constraints that Western writers do not face, and that his fiction’s actual engagement with Chinese history speaks for itself—has been assessed differently by different critics. The work does speak for itself: Red Sorghum (1987), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out are all books that engage with the darkest periods of twentieth-century Chinese history with a directness that has made them controversial in China as well as celebrated internationally.

Mo Yan himself has said in interviews that Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is his best novel—an unusual claim for a writer to make about his own work, and one that reflects the book’s unique formal achievement. The translation by Howard Goldblatt, who has translated most of Mo Yan’s work into English, captures the carnivalesque energy of the prose while managing the considerable technical challenge of rendering animal consciousness in a language not organized around it. For readers new to Mo Yan, Red Sorghum is the more common starting point, but Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is the more complete and more ambitious work.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Mo Yan’s self-described finest novel uses reincarnated animals to narrate half a century of Chinese history with a structural invention no other form could achieve: dark, comic, and persistently alive to the humanity—and the animality—of everyone caught in the machinery of ideology.