Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature

Tales and Commentary

Wilt L. Idema

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295744841
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In literatures worldwide, animal fables have been analyzed for their revealingly anthropomorphic views, but until now little attention has been given to the animal tales of China. The complex, competitive relationship between rodents (vilified as thieves of grain) and the felines with whom they are perennially at war is explored in this presentation of Chinese tales about cats and mice. Master translator Wilt Idema situates them in an overview of animal tales in world literature, in the Chinese literary tradition as a whole, and within Chinese imaginative depictions of animals. The tales demonstrate the animals' symbolism and their unusually prominent—and verbal—role in the stories. These readings depict cats and mice in conflict, in marital bonds, and in litigation—most centrally in a legal case of a mouse against a cat in the underworld court of King Yama. Many of the stories adopt the perspective of the mice as animals merely trying to survive, while also recognizing that cats are natural hunters. This entertaining volume will appeal to readers interested in Chinese literature and society, comparative literature, and posthumanist consideration of human-animal relations.

1

Thieving Rats and Pampered Cats

FROM THE MOMENT HUMANS STARTED TO FARM AND STORE grain, mice and rats have been seen as pests. Early Chinese documents repeatedly refer to mice and rats as robbers and thieves. If these sources rarely distinguish between species of rodents, they do draw attention to their habitat. The “altar rats” (sheshu) that burrow their holes in the altar to the local god of the soil (a small artificial hill) are difficult to smoke out and kill without destroying the altar, and the “granary rats” (cangshu) that make their home in the large grain pits and granaries of the state are described as fat, haughty, and fearless. The young Li Si (d. 208 BCE), who would eventually become the leading minister of the First Emperor (d. 210 BCE), was inspired by the sight of granary rats to pursue an ambitious career, as we learn from an anecdote in his biography in Sima Qian’s (second half second century BCE) Records of the Historian (Shiji):

Li Si was a native of Shangcai in Chu. In his youth he served as a petty clerk in the province. In the privy of the clerks’ quarters he saw how the rats ate the filth and how, when people or dogs came near, they were always alarmed and terrified. But when he entered the granary, he saw how the rats in the granary ate the heaps of grain and lived under a big roof, never having to worry about people or dogs. Li Si sighed and said, “Whether a man turns out to be a worthy or a good-for-nothing is like these rats—it all depends on the surroundings he chooses for himself!”¹

Of course, the Chinese tried to free themselves of mice and rats, and they used every means at their disposal, from poison and traps to dogs and cats, as well as magic. Several early sources contain detailed descriptions of a rat exorcism that was to be conducted in the first month of the year. “During that month at dawn before the sun came out, the head of the household was to ‘behead’ or cut open a rat, suspend it in the middle of the house and chant an exorcistic prayer.”² The simple texts of such prayers are still included in works of the Tang dynasty (618–906). This ritual execution of a rat may perhaps also be the background of another often-quoted anecdote about the thievish nature of rats, which is included in Sima Qian’s biography of Zhang Tang (d. 115), one of the “harsh officials” of the Western Han dynasty:

Zhang Tang hailed from Du. His father was an aide for the Chang’an [marketplaces]. Once, when he went out, he left Tang, then only a child, in charge of their lodgings. When he returned, a rat had stolen the meat, and the enraged father administered a beating to Tang. By digging out its hole, Tang caught the thieving rat together with what was left of the meat. He accused the rat and had it bastinadoed, whereupon he took down its statement in writing. Following interrogation and trial he discussed the fitting punishment. Bringing out both the rat and the meat, he conducted a judicial dismemberment in front of the hall. When his father saw this, and also noted that his phraseology was like that of an experienced judicial officer, he was amazed and from then on had him clerk law-cases.³

The exorcist rituals would survive into late-imperial and modern times, even though they had then changed into the “wedding of the mouse,” in which the dismemberment of the rodents was left to the cat. It is less clear, however, whether the rat’s unfortunate encounter with the law as told in the biography of Zhang Tang had any impact on the origin of the late-imperial story of the court case of the mouse against the cat, which also ends disastrously for the rodent.

RAPACIOUS RATS

Because of their thievish nature, mice and rats from an early date became a common image for rapacious officials. The earliest example of this image is found in The Book of Odes (Shijing), China’s oldest collection of poetry. The materials in The Book of Odes date from roughly the period 1000–600 BCE and range from ritual hymns to festive songs. In the “Airs of Wei” section, we encounter a song called “Big Rat.” In the translation of Arthur Waley the first stanza of this song reads:

Big rat, big rat,

Do not gobble our millet!

Three years we have slaved for you,

Yet you take no notice of us.

At last we are going to leave you

And go to that happy land;

Happy land, happy land,

Where we shall have our place.⁴

This translation reflects the interpretation of this song in the earliest preserved layer of commentary on The Book of Odes, the so-called Small Prefaces. The relevant “small preface” reads: “The ‘Big Rat’ was directed against heavy exactions. The people brand in it their ruler, levying heavy exactions, and silkworm-like eating them up, not attending well to the government, greedy and yet fearful, like a great rat.”⁵

That seems straightforward enough, so this interpretation has been followed by the overwhelming majority of commentators in imperial and in modern times. Still the song has engendered considerable controversy among scholars. One issue concerns the species of rodent that is intended by the expression “big rat.” Some commentators have noted that common mice and rats don’t eat “sprouts” and have tried to identify a more suitable candidate.⁶ Other scholars have tried to link this song to a specific tax increase in the state of Lu in the year 596 BCE, which would make this the youngest poem in The Book of Odes, but yet other scholars reject that hypothesis because the song is included among the “Airs of Wei” and this state of Wei was annihilated by the state of Jin in 661 BCE.⁷ One modern scholar has argued that the song reflects the attitude not of the population at large (they never would dare speak up in such a disrespectful manner to their ruler) but that of a highranking vassal who has decided to shift his allegiance to a different lord.⁸

One recent proposal, which is perhaps most interesting to us, suggests a completely different reading. Instead of interpreting the song as a complaint of the peasants addressed to their lord, it proposes to read the song as a prayer of the peasants to the rodents in their fields, asking them to leave, before the farmers are forced to take more drastic measures.⁹ Such a prayer would be comparable to the prayers addressed by officials to tigers, alligators, and other threatening animals throughout the history of imperial China, imploring these animals to leave the territory under their administration and allowing them a set period before taking drastic action. A prayer inviting rats to leave, for instance, is encountered in the following song, which in modern times was still performed by farmers in Qinghai when they sacrificed to rats:

Of birth-year images you are the first,

So you must be the common people’s friend.

The common people see in food their heaven:

If crops are poor, then old and young will starve.

We sacrifice to you here in this field

And pray that you will understand our worries:

Go far away and feed on trees and grasses—

Don’t sink your teeth into our millet plants!¹⁰

If one is willing to follow this interpretation, the translation of the song from The Book of Odes has of course to be adapted. The first stanza might then be rendered as follows:

Great rat, great rat,

Don’t eat our millet.

Three years we have slaved for you.

Now go away, we’ll send you off.

Leave for that happy land;

That happy land, that happy land—

So we shall have our place.

But even if we accept this new interpretation of the function and the content of this song, the rats would still be seen as rapacious thieves, and the fat granary rat continued to be a common image for corrupt officials who thrive while the common people suffer. This comes across clearly in the following poem by the ninth-century poet Cao Ye:

Government Granary Rats

The rats in the state granaries: they are as big as bushels

And do not flee when they see people opening the doors.

The soldiers have no rations and the common people starve—

Who ships the grain day in day out into that maw of yours?¹¹

Throughout the later dynasties, too, writers would decry the rapaciousness of rats. Their complaints would not be limited anymore to the theft of grain but would also extend to the destructiveness of rodents in ruining textiles and paper.¹² Quite often, as we will see, such complaints were combined with bitter laments about the laziness of cats.

If rats and mice steal food to eat, they also steal other objects, the disappearance of which can create divisive suspicions among members of the same family or neighbors. Xie Cheng’s (182–254) lost History of the Later Han Dynasty (Hou Han shu) is said to have included the following anecdote: “Li Jing was the slave of the minister of the kingdom of Zhao. In the hole of a rat he found stringed pearls and eardrops that were linked together. When he asked the head clerk about these, the latter replied, ‘Her ladyship the wife of the minister lost these three pearls some time ago. Because she suspected her son’s wife of stealing them, she had him divorce that woman.’ Jing then took the pearls to the former minister and handed them to him. The minister was ashamed and urged the divorced woman to come back.”¹³

The mid-seventeenth-century playwright Zhu Suchen made use of a comparable plot element in his Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; also known as Double Bear Dream [Shuangxiong meng]). In one of the play’s subplots, a poor student lives next door to the family of a rice merchant, his ugly son, and the latter’s bride-to-be. Because rats are damaging his books, the student buys rat poison and puts it inside pancakes. These are taken next door by the rats through a hole in the wall, where they are eaten by the merchant’s son, who dies. At the same time, the rats take a piece of the gold jewelry of the bride-to-be to the student’s room. When the student takes it to his neighbor to buy some rice, the merchant recognizes the object and accuses the student of conducting an affair with his daughter-in-law-to-be and murdering his son. In this play, no actual rats come onstage; one only hears them moving and squeaking backstage. In another subplot of the play, a thief called Lou the Rat (Lou Ashu) commits a murder that later is pinned on the student’s brother.¹⁴ All ends well when a perspicacious judge arrives on the scene at the last moment to clear the brothers of the murder charges and see both of them married.

The sheer terror even the thought of a rat might inspire is well brought out by a set piece on a nightmare from modern Henanese storytelling:

Last night when the evening drum had sounded midnight I had a dream,

And in my dream I saw a rat that had become a monster:

That rat weighed in at more than a hundred pounds,

That rat measured more than ten full feet in height.

It had caught a man still alive holding him in its maw;

It ripped him in two as it swallowed him whole.

But while this rat was dining on that man’s flesh,

There arrived four cats that also were monsters.

Filled with fear, the rat ran...