Grandma’s parents marry her off to a leper when she is sixteen for the promise of a mule from the family of a rich wine distiller. Yu Zhan’ao braces brutal confrontations both with Japanese soldiers and local warlords armed to teeth. The story shuffles back and forth in time, dwelling on anecdotes that shape and emphasize the personas of Granddad and Grandma. Douguan, or ‘father’, is their lovechild who also figures prominently as a witness and a participant in many of the events. The story is spun around a ruthless bandit-cum-guerrilla Yu Zhan’ao and his wife Dai, referred to as Granddad and Grandma by the narrator. Red Sorghum is a chronicle of blights and massacres unleashed by the Japanese forces on the peasantry of Northeast Gaomi Province during the second Sino-Japanese War. Red Sorghum was the first of Mo Yan’s works translated by Goldblatt in 1993. The credit for Mo Yan’s introduction to the English speaking world, one may daresay to the Nobel pedestal, goes squarely to Howard Goldblatt, his translator and ardent supporter, whose transcriptions are allegedly ‘superior to the original’. The Swedish Academy sees in him an author “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. Then there are those who have likened Mo Yan to Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. His language has been found ‘diseased’ and ‘banal’, his authority that of a stooge and a ‘party hack’.

When the Nobel Prize for Literature went his way in 2012, it was deemed a ‘catastrophe’, a ‘betrayal’ and an ‘ominous signal’ by the fraternity, including his compatriots in exile. Mo Yan is not quite the toast of the writing community west of China.

Red sorghum by mo yan