Book review: Geling Yan’s historical drama ‘Little Aunt Crane’ turns into a crime of fiction

A promising tale of survival and friendship at the end of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria flounders in cliché and unimaginative prose.

Little Aunt Crane by Geling Yan is published by Harvill Secker.

The novelist and screenwriter Geling Yan is among the most acclaimed figures of contemporary Chinese letters. Since the publication of her first work of fiction in 1985, she has written more than 20 books, received 30 awards, and has had her writing translated into 12 languages. She has also had several works adapted for film.

The most recent of these adaptations, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Chistian Bale, brought to life her fourth book translated into English, The Flowers of War. In this novel, Yan sought to tell the story, through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl named Shujuan, of the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Nanking in the late 1930s, and of the barbarism that its inhabitants were subjected to at the hands of the Japanese armed forces.

Little Aunt Crane, the fifth and most recent of Yan's works to be translated into English, shares many of the preoccupations of The Flowers of War. The novel chronicles the consequences of the collapse of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the final days of the Second World War. It does so by way of the experiences of a teenage girl, the 16-year-old Tatsuru.

When we join her at the beginning of the novel, the Japanese elders of the Manchurian village she inhabits are facing imminent defeat at the hands of the approaching Chinese. Rather than face the humiliation of being routed, the elders decide to preserve their honour by killing both themselves and the members of the settler communities for which they are responsible: “Stern and grim, the elders stood behind the village head as he announced their decision. He said: ‘We are Japanese, so we will die with dignity beside our fellow Japanese. The elders have done everything in their power to obtain sufficient bullets.’”

And so it proves. Everybody in the region is killed. Except, of course, young Tatsuru, who sees all of this take place, along with the death of her mother and siblings (“A grenade exploded next to Tatsuru’s mother, and when the smoke had cleared, Tatsuru no longer had a mother, brother or sister). As she attempts to escape their fate, she falls into the hands of traffickers and is sold to a wealthy Chinese family. At their hands, under the new name of Duohe, she is forced to become a secret second wife to the family’s only son, and to carry his children.

From this point, we follow Tatsuru’s – or Duohe’s – life with her new family across several decades, and as we do so we are introduced to the friendship she forms with the son’s first wife, Xiaohuan. There is some pleasure to be found in this part of the story, and Yan can prove adept at bringing to the page something of the quiet thrill of the closest and most supportive of relationships. She also writes knowledgeably about the realities of life under Maoist rule (of which Yan has first-hand experience), and there are signs that she might almost be capable of spinning a compelling narrative.

What stops her from achieving that, and what makes this book such a catastrophe, is the quality of Yan’s prose. To remark that we have here a collection of pages in which no stylistic crime goes uncommitted might seem unfair (this is, after all, a long book). Yet Yan’s talent for infelicity is such that she is able to commit all imaginable literary misdemeanours within the first 30 pages, and then treat the following 450 as a playground for aesthetic recidivism.

This is a novel, to confine myself to Yan’s capacity for cliché, in which people find themselves “in unusually high spirits”; events become “common knowledge”; tasks must be carried out “no matter what”; fellow travellers sleep “like the dead” (or fall “fast asleep”); and in which heels are “turned on” so that people can run “like the wind” – unable to “believe their ears” – from another round of gunfire that is sure to be described as having “rang out”.

One might ask whether Yan's responsibility for such writing is mitigated by the fact that this is a translation. I do not think it can be. Yan has enough English to have written in the language herself (as she did in the novel The Uninvited). She cannot have been unaware of the infelicities that appear under her name here. No story deserves to be told in such inert, stale and indecorous language. And no reader should be subjected to it.

Matthew Adams is ­based in London and writes for the TLS, The Spectator and the Literary Review.