Red Sorghum

The World of the Novel

Red Sorghum is set in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, in the 1930s, and the landscape is not merely a backdrop but the novel’s primary sensory fact. The red sorghum fields — vast, blood-coloured, opaque, smelling of fermented grain and human decay — are where everything that matters in the novel happens: the love affair that begins in them, the murders that occur among them, the battle that ends in them. Mo Yan’s relationship to this landscape is the relationship of a man whose grandparents lived and died in it, reconstructed by a grandson narrator who is trying to recover a past that is both intimate and irrecoverable.

The narrator’s mode is crucial to understanding the novel’s form. He is not reporting events he witnessed — he is reconstructing events from family stories, from the perspective of the dead as well as the living, from a position that allows him to imagine the interior lives of people who died before he was born. This is not magical realism in the Latin American sense, imported as a literary technique from Borges or Márquez. It is something rooted in Chinese folk narrative tradition, in the ballads and storytelling forms of Shandong, where the living and the dead coexist in the same narrative space and where the boundary between memory and imagination is deliberately left porous. Mo Yan has spoken extensively about the oral tradition of Gaomi County as the primary influence on his prose, and the novel’s rhythm — its repetitions, its digressions, its willingness to follow a detail to its consequences decades in the future — reflects that tradition more than any literary modernism.

Grandma

The novel’s centre is the woman the narrator calls Grandma — Dai Fenglian — who is never less than extraordinary. She is being carried in a palanquin to marry a sorghum winery owner named Shan Bianlang, who is rumoured to be a leper. The palanquin bearer, Yu Zhan’ao, falls in love with her during the journey. She falls in love with him. By the time they arrive at the winery, something has already happened between them that changes both their lives. What follows — the murder of the leper husband, the takeover of the winery, the love affair conducted in the sorghum fields — is presented by Mo Yan with a frankness about female desire that is striking in any literary tradition and particularly so in the context of Chinese fiction.

Grandma wants what she wants. She chooses who she chooses. She is not punished for her desire in the way that female characters in moral fiction conventionally are — her agency is not framed as transgression requiring consequence. Mo Yan presents her as the fullest possible human being, someone whose capacity for desire is inseparable from her capacity for courage and leadership. When the Japanese invasion arrives and the men around her are paralysed by fear or opportunism, it is Grandma who organises the resistance. Her death — which arrives in the novel’s most devastating sequence — is not presented as punishment for her irregular life but as the product of a historical violence that destroys the extraordinary and the ordinary alike.

The Resistance

The Japanese invasion enters the novel as a force that reorganises everything around it. Yu Zhan’ao’s guerrilla resistance — ambushes in the sorghum fields, hit-and-run attacks on Japanese convoys — is presented with no romantic heroism. The guerrillas are brutal because they have to be, undisciplined because they are farmers and winery workers rather than soldiers, effective sometimes and catastrophically ineffective at others. The novel’s climactic ambush sequence, in which the resistance fighters attack a Japanese convoy in the sorghum fields with devastating consequences for both sides, is one of the most viscerally written battle sequences in contemporary fiction — violent, chaotic, and completely without the orderly moral clarity that war narratives usually impose.

Zhang Yimou’s 1987 film adaptation — his debut feature, starring Gong Li as Grandma — was the film that brought Mo Yan’s work to international attention and brought Zhang Yimou himself to the world’s notice. The film captures the sensory intensity of the novel — the red of the sorghum, the colour and heat of the landscape — and Gong Li’s performance gives Grandma a presence that the film can accommodate. The novel is richer and stranger than the film, more willing to digress and to inhabit the dead, but the film is a remarkable work in its own right and a useful entry point for readers who want to encounter the story before committing to the novel’s demanding prose.

Mo Yan and the Nobel Prize

Red Sorghum was the work that made Mo Yan — the pen name, meaning “don’t speak,” of the Shandong-born writer Guan Moye — a major figure in contemporary Chinese literature. Originally published in the late 1980s and assembled from a sequence of linked novellas, it announced a voice unlike anything else in the post-Mao literary landscape: earthy, violent, sensuous, and rooted in the soil and folklore of his native Gaomi County, which he would mythologize across his entire body of work much as Faulkner did with Yoknapatawpha County. In 2012 Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first resident citizen of the People’s Republic of China to receive it, with the Swedish Academy praising his “hallucinatory realism” that “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The award was not without controversy — some Western commentators criticized his position within the official Chinese Writers’ Association and his reticence on political dissidents — but few dispute the originality and force of his fiction, of which Red Sorghum remains the most celebrated and accessible example.

How to Read It

Readers coming to Red Sorghum should be prepared for a structure that owes more to oral storytelling than to the tidy arc of the Western novel. The chronology folds back on itself, the narration moves between the living and the dead, and the violence — particularly in the harrowing later sequences depicting Japanese atrocities — is rendered without flinching. This is not gratuitousness but a deliberate refusal of the sanitized heroism that war narratives usually supply; the brutality is the medium through which Mo Yan reveals both character and history. The novel rewards readers who can surrender to its rhythms rather than fighting for linear clarity, and who are drawn to fiction that treats landscape, memory, and folk legend as living forces. For anyone interested in twentieth-century China, in the literature of resistance and occupation, or simply in one of the most vivid and unconventional family sagas in world fiction, it is an essential and unforgettable book — best approached, perhaps, after the film, which supplies an entry into a story the novel then deepens and complicates beyond measure.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A hallucinatory, violent, and deeply original novel that brings rural Shandong to life with the force of oral legend, and that centres a female figure of extraordinary vitality in a history that tried to erase her.