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Settling Some Unfinished Business—Sword at Sky’s End

I collect old wuxia novels, and so I have a bunch on my shelves I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. Sometimes I like to just peruse the endings of ones I haven’t read, hoping to find one that doesn’t have the generic, happy, protagonist + female lead walking into the sunset and laughing ending. Cause that’s how a lot of wuxia novels end. Most of them are happy endings. I like endings with a bit more pathos myself, so it’s always nice to find one.

A couple months ago I was doing this, reading the endings of some Yun Zhongyue novels, and I stumbled upon one that was quite a bit different than the normal happy ending. That novel is Sword at Sky’s End《劍在天涯》(1989). This one has both a happy and a tragic (sort of) ending, but what’s notable about it is that the novel does not end with the protagonist.

Instead, after the hero’s story is wrapped up, there’s another denouement that follows a secondary character. I won’t call it an epilogue because it’s not, it’s just another scene at the end of the last chapter, chapter 40.

Anyway, I thought I’d translate the ending because it’s pretty satisfying. First some setup:

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New (Old) Books

Got some new books today, all from my favorite wuxia author, Yun Zhongyue 雲中岳. The one with the pink cover pictured below is a collection of three novellas. It’s the fourth in a series of six novella collections from Yun Zhongyue. I’ve got them all now except the last one. It was published in 1981, though I suspect the individual novellas probably first appeared in wuxia magazines before being collected here (though I’m not sure).

The other two are really two parts of one novel. The one with the blue title is Sea of Swords, Waves of Emotion《劍海情濤》, and the one with the red title is its continuation, Bloody Sword, Thoroughwort Heart《血劍蘭心》. The latter is not a sequel but simply the second part of the novel repackaged to look like a sequel. It was all originally published as one book, under the former’s name, Sea of Swords. It was originally published April 1963 and is Yun Zhongyue’s debut novel. These pictured here are reprints from the 90s.

Fun fact about thoroughwort, which is what I translated for 蘭/兰, lan. Usually this is translated as orchid, which is what it does usually refer to nowadays. However, 蘭 didn’t begin to be used for orchid until the Song dynasty. Before that it referred to 蘭草, aka thoroughwort, aka Eupatorium fortunei or Eupatorium japonicum. It has fragrant flowers, and classic idioms and phrases using this word, such as 金蘭之交 (lit. intermingling of gold and thoroughwort, i.e sworn brotherhood/intimate friendship), are referencing thoroughwort, not orchid.

In the title Bloody Sword, Thoroughwort Heart, “thoroughwort heart” means a woman’s refined character. Thorougwort, according to A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, is “often symbolic of purity of character, redolent integrity.” So there you go. If you ever find yourself translating, say, a Tang dynasty poem, and you run across 蘭, it’s not orchid.

  • 《古道照顏色》(Ancient Path Shining Ahead) Yun Zhongyue
  • 《劍海情濤》(Sea of Swords, Waves of Emotion), Yun Zhongyue
  • 血劍蘭心》(lit. Bloody Sword, Thoroughwort Heart), Yun Zhongyue
  • ~1,500 pages total
Frontispiece illustration of Sea of Swords, Waves of Emotion
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Yun Zhongyue’s Jianghu

Test

by xuefengzisui (雪峰資水)
Nanjing University 小百合站, May 16, 2003

Seeing people talk about Jin Yong every day moved me to write this essay. Every wuxia star is like a perilous peak among a towering range of mountains. Although they all stand firmly, tall and straight among the clouds and mist, each has its own distance and height. Everyone has their favorite author, and readers are perhaps the most partial. Reading wuxia, if a reader likes one writer and regards others as a pair of old shoes, then it’s a lot like visiting a famous mountain yet not appreciating or delighting in it. Wuxia, despite being fiction that narrates stories of made-up characters, every writer has his own method of fabrication, and from these methods we can see where current trends spring up. Regarding wuxia authors from Hong Kong and Taiwan, I believe there are several whose accomplishments are underrated. Whenever I see people loudly declaim at forum discussions that everyone other than Jin Yong is trash, or everyone except X is trash, I can’t help but sigh at their juvenile attitude. The ancients said, “A leaf blocks the eye and you can’t see Mt. Tai”. For a lot of wuxia readers, Jin Yong has become the standard, and Jin Yong’s jianghu has become a model, and wuxia should be written this way.

But although everyone knows that Jin Yong is excellent, he is still not capable of overshadowing others’ literary grace. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, aside from the greats: Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng, Wen Rui’an, and Huang Yi, there are three other authors whose achievements have been underrated, and those three are: Sima Ling, Sima Ziyan, and Yun Zhongyue (雲中岳). It’s too bad that, despite the fact that these three authors’ novels have their own unique characteristics, people still rate them as second-rate wuxia authors, along with Zhuge Qingyun and his generation. The special traits of Sima Ling and Sima Ziyan’s novels will be discussed in other essays. Here I want to talk about Yun Zhongyue.

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Chivalry in Mighty Dragon Crosses the River

A snippet from the novel by Yun Zhongyue

“And you? It seems you two are in the right.” The white-faced woman glanced at Omnipresent Earth God, who had just returned. “I heard Lady Venom is a vicious woman despised by all within the wulin. Please tell me, are you two men of chivalry?”

“Hahaha!” Zhao Jiu guffawed. “What’s a man of chivalry? I can tell you, anyone who wields a sword or sabre thinking he can judge right and wrong is a swindler using the name of chivalry to commit all kinds of heinous deeds. Us four call ourselves ghost, god, demon, and goblin. We pay no heed to the business of heaven and earth or of the gods. We do what we consider heroic deeds regardless of the danger.

“Over these ten long years, we have come and gone through the gates of Hell, we have shed many tears, we have thrown our heads back to the sky laughing, we have played with our lives and used violence to violate the law… Stay out of our business, okay?”

“Have you committed heinous crimes?”

“Oh! Hard to say. Everyone has their own more or less different way of looking at things.” He raised his sword. “Miss, look at this sword here. It’s thin as a wire. Look at if from the side and it’s an inch and a half wide piece of metal. That Lady Venom secretly ambushed me with her poison needles, then viciously attacked me with a dagger. The way I see it, she tried to kill me so I have the right to kill her. The authorities would say I absolutely do not have the right to kill her, I can only let the law of the land punish her. Miss, what do you think?”

“Uhh…”

“Miss, you are young.”

“That… That’s nonsense.”

“I know I’m right, because you’re not using twisted words and forcing logic to refute me. We have to extract a testimony here. May we ask you, Miss, to withdraw?”

“No,” the white-faced woman flatly refused. “Even if you have the right to kill her, in the end killing is not a pleasant thing. People should not murder and eat each other up like wild animals do.”

“So you think we should…”

“Hand them over to the authorities to deal with.”

“Then there’s nothing for us to discuss. Miss, I’d like to ask you to leave.”

“You…”

“Miss, I’m serious.”

“I won’t allow you to use illegal torture.” The white-faced woman said resolutely, “I want to witness it with my own eyes, I want…”

“You don’t want anything.” Zhao Jiu sheathed his sword. “Go on!”

from Mighty Dragon Crosses the River《強龍過江》by Yun Zhongyue 雲中岳

 

Yun Zhongyue’s novels eschew the classic concept of the righteous hero. More than that, he mocks the idea of it. In Yun Zhongyue’s jianghu, the line between good and evil is blurred and there is much crossover, and this morality is embodied in his characters.

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Mighty Dragon Crosses the River — Yun Zhongyue

Mighty Dragon Crosses the River (hereafter Mighty Dragon) was published in 1984. It’s a pretty typical novel for Yun Zhongyue, as it is set in the Ming dynasty and features historical figures and/or organizations. Yun Zhongyue is known for his acute attention to historical detail. Thus, his novels are more “realistic” than most. He even pays attention to the travel permits required during the Ming dynasty to move from one place to another. The lack of such a permit often becomes a source of conflit his characters have to overcome. Because Yun Zhongyue’s characters are not supernaturally powerful; they can’t take out swathes of men by themselves. A mass of government troops is still formidable than even the strongest single martial arts expert.

And Yun Zhongyue’s protagonists are often not part of the martial fraternity or the jianghu at all at the beginning, but get drawn into that world for one reason or another. Mighty Dragon is a bit different in this regard because the main characters are already martial arts experts of the martial fraternity. But many of his novels feature regular people struggling to get by and survive the world they’ve been thrust into. And needing a job is something his characters have to deal with. His novels are not like most where characters wonder around without any money or belongings, yet somehow never find it difficult to pay for things or otherwise survive. Mighty Dragon is also the only one of Yun Zhongyue’s eighty novels (yes, you read that right, and he wrote every one himself without the help of a ghostwriter–by hand) to feature a group of main characters: The Retribution Gods of the Four Seas. His other novels feature a single protagonist.

The excerpt below is a small portion of the first chapter, starting from the beginning. I will post more about Yun Zhongyue in future releases. He’s one of my favorite wuxia authors, and unfortunately he is grossly underrated. But if you want good, detailed historical wuxia, no one does it better.

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