Divination (打卦) by Chui Feng Cheng Qu (吹风成曲) / You Jiao Yao Shui (有觉要睡): Review

[douqi]

In the same way that I over-engineer my overall TBR list (e.g. by requiring two pro-published books in English for every book in Chinese), I also over-engineer the 'baihe novels' section of that TBR list, by requiring myself to read a new-to-me author at least once in every three books. Divination (打卦, pinyin: dagua) was the one by the new-to-me author for the most recent cycle. The audio drama adaptation happened to come out just as I was compiling my TBR list, and I found both the poster (left) and the synopsis of the novel to be intriguing enough for me to put it on the list.

Divination is a contemporary supernatural thriller that also kind of falls into urban fantasy territory. The protagonist is Xun Ruosu, a professional clairvoyant, and the last scion of a long line of professional clairvoyants. Because they spend so much time peering at things which mortals are not designed to know about, members of the Xun family are all extraordinarily short-lived. They also all know exactly when they're going to die — including, of course, Xun Ruosu. The day before her death, she places herself in her coffin and arranges for the coffin to be brought to the Xun family's ancestral burial ground, giving instructions for the undertaker to return the following day (once she has properly expired) to fill in the grave. The hour of her death rolls round, but unexpectedly, Xun Ruosu doesn't die. Instead, an aggressively beautiful woman climbs out of one of the nearby graves and demands to know what's going on. Her name is Xue Tong and she's the King of the Tenth Court of Hell, whose task is to usher recalcitrant (sometimes downright malevolent) souls into the cycle of reincarnation.

We soon learn that Xun Ruosu is still alive because her ancestor Xun Jian placed a ward on Xue Tong that has the effect of binding Xue Tong's life to the life of the last living member of the Xun family: as long as Xue Tong lives, so does Xun Ruosu. The pair of them are swiftly thrown into an escalating series of adventures, each involving a lingering ghost or some other supernatural creature, which they have to guide back into the cycle of reincarnation. The two of them are a classic brains-and-brawn duo: Xun Ruosu favours creatively-crafted talismans and persuasion, while Xue Tong prefers beating her targets into submission. As the story progresses, the pair of them come to realise that the situations they're thrown into and the ghosts, other supernatural creatures and occasional human they meet are inextricably linked to their shared past.

The shared past is this: Xun Ruosu is one-half of Dizang, a bodhisattva who in Buddhist eschatology is committed to delivering the dead from the torments of Hell, and Xue Tong was once one of her students (as were the other Kings of Hell). Xue Tong fell in love with Dizang, and Dizang felt herself beginning to reciprocate those feelings. So she did what any sensible teacher would do: tore her soul in half — one half containing her untrammelled-by-romantic-feelings bodhisattva nature, and one half containing her romantic love for Xue Tong — and flung both into the cycle of reincarnation. After many cycles, the half-soul with all the feelings was eventually reincarnated as Xun Ruosu. Xun Ruosu is initially completely ignorant of this, though as the story progresses, she gets little flashbacks to the past before being hit with the big reveal. Xue Tong, meanwhile, is aware of most of this — she knows that Dizang entered the cycle of reincarnation, and she believes Xun Ruosu to be Dizang's reincarnation. But it's only towards the final quarter of the novel that both she and we learn about the fact that Dizang tore her soul in half and that Xun Ruosu is not the whole of Dizang, but rather a much more human version who has the capacity to love Xue Tong romantically and fully in a way Dizang, restrained by her duty and nature, could not.

I have to give the author props for making Xun Ruosu actually reflect on all these discoveries, and in particular to have her wonder quite hard about who she really is and how her memories of her past life (which are eventually restored) affect her sense of self. The author didn't take this nearly as far as I wanted — in the end, Xun Ruosu still accepts what she learns is her identity with far too much equanimity — but I'm pleased to see that these questions were actually raised at all. Both Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong are, to my mind, too quick to accept the situation, and each other. I wanted a lot more space for them to process the situation, have doubts, think through the doubts, and come to a considered decision about their relationship with each other. The pace of the novel doesn't really give them the space to do that, as it proceeds at an almost breakneck speed, dumping them into the next arc before they've even had time to catch their breath after the last adventure (as they're unceremoniously thrust into their last mission in the book, Xue Tong basically looks up at Heaven and says disbelievingly, 'You've got to be kidding me'). The novel ends with a happily ever after, reinforced by the final extra. It's simply accepted by the two of them and everyone around them that they're deeply in love, always have been, and will now be together forever. This to my mind felt unearned. Xue Tong may have been in love with Dizang for thousands of years, but she doesn't really know Xun Ruosu — who's her own independent person by now — all that well. And while Xun Ruosu has the soul-memory of Dizang's feelings for Xue Tong, I needed to see her develop her own feelings for Xue Tong, not just adopt her predecessor's wholesale. For me, the relationship between Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong (as opposed to Dizang and Xue Tong) doesn't progress quickly or deeply enough through their adventures to reach the level of 'true love' by the end of the novel — I would have preferred an ending where they acknowledge their attraction to and affection for each other, and agree to get to know each other better. That, I felt, was the actual level of their relationship at that point in the novel — on the way to 'true love', but not really there yet.

Having said that, I did enjoy Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong as a pairing a lot — they banter with and snipe at each other throughout the book in a very entertaining way, and they clearly grow to care for each other. Xun Ruosu is a refreshing take on the 'cool, inscrutable love interest', which tend to have dull-to-non-existent personalities. While Xun Ruosu is generally mild-mannered ('a nice girl', my aunts would agree), she has a wry sense of humour, and her comebacks often leave Xue Tong tongue-tied. When she first sees Xue Tong, for instance, Xun Ruosu's immediate response is to close her eyes (like a good little corpse), lie back in her coffin, and state calmly, 'If you have a fortune that needs telling, go find someone else. I'm enjoying my retirement.' Xue Tong is a good foil for her, being tempestuous, easily provoked, quite petty (but also capable of grand gestures of compassion and care), and also possessing a wicked (though less subtle) sense of humour of her own. The world-building was interesting, though I did feel that it could be better thought through and explained more clearly, especially the concepts and techniques that were directly relevant to the plot. Some of the 'solutions' to the various challenges they encountered seemed to come a bit out of nowhere, and would be more effective and have more weight if contextualised more clearly.

I read the Chinese original of the novel here on JJWXC. There is also a prequel extra, which can be found here. At some point between my starting the novel and finishing it, the author changed her name from Chui Feng Cheng Qu to You Jiao Yao Shui.