The Tower of Myriad Mirrors

Chinas most outrageous characterthe magical Monkey who battles a hundred monstersreturns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversarys body in Journey to the West. The Tower of Myriad Mirrors is the only novel of Tung Yeh (16201686), a monk and Confucian scholar. Tung picks up the slapstick of the original tale and overlays it with Buddhist theory and bitter satire of the Ming governments capitulation to the Manchus. After a nod to Journeys storyteller format, Tung carries Monkeys quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important though relatively unknown link in the development of the Chinese novel, and a window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a wonderful read.