Red Sorghum, Mo Yan

Lyrical, haunting, colorful, and disturbing, Red Sorghum is a powerful novel that is set during one of the darkest periods of Chinese history, the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. I’d known from reading The Rape of Nanking some of the horrors that Japanese soldiers did to defenseless civilians, but to read about them in a novel, one in which I grew to love its setting and characters, is especially unsettling. Amidst all the wretched spoils of war and unstable love affairs in Red Sorghum, atmospheric, dynamic descriptions of its natural setting are prominent in every chapter, especially ones involving the sun painting landscapes laden by fields of endless sorghum with rich color. At times I felt like the red, rising ball of the sun was a metaphor for the Japanese flag, the one which Japanese soldiers most likely marched into China with as the sun baked the Earth below with its threatening radioactivity. 

Mo Yan is a controversial figure in China; his work is praised by the communist party, but critics claim that their support makes him a proponent of censorship. While he has not outright said this, his own support of the party might suggest he shares the same view. However, his work would most likely be censored if he didn’t support the party, so I have doubts that he really is against censorship. It’s up to the reader to read between the lines and see if he he/she notices the anti-totalitarian themes in his novels. I’ve only read two of his novels, but I didn’t get the impression that he was trying to glorify his government at all. If anything, he satirized it in The Republic of Wine with the grandiose portrayals of savagery and gluttony that Liquorland’s ruling class displayed. Like Salman Rushide, an author as misunderstood as this should be recognized for his poetical talents, not for his supposed crusades against religious or political ideologies.