With the heart of a craftsman, Mo Yin returns to fiction, transforming it into a deeply personal endeavor that is tied to one’s inner nature and artistic skill. “She” and “her” lives exist in a mirrored yet independent relationship. This independence embodies both individuality and a distinctive linguistic and aesthetic sensibility. The plural “she” emerges from her translations, from every novel she writes, and even more so from the world she inhabits day by day.

— Critic He Ping

Mo Yin pays close attention to urban “literary youth,” whether they are growing older or still young. In the years around the turn of the new century, they flocked together: first exploring social media, then building sci-fi worlds, or learning to paint, selling records, and collecting bytes from piles of old paper. Yet over time, most of them drifted away from the arts and literature, leaving them to gaze into the distance under the winter sun, trying to catch glimpses of their past wanderings.

A vague, formless sadness is neatly pressed and smoothed into the depths of the memories of the era Mo Yin has lived through. Standing at a fateful juncture, she restores the inevitable bittersweet taste between fiction and nonfiction.

— Writer Zhang Yiw ei

There is a kind of self-consistency in Mo Yin that resembles Haruki Murakami. She writes and translates with discipline, determined to remain a novelist even in an age when the novel seems to be fading. She has her own stable anchor of values and hopes to survive without relying on external systems of evaluation.

— “Renwu” Magazine

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My three favorite pieces are probably “Shanghai Night”, “Summer on the Other Shore,” and “The Person in the Cabinet.”,

“Shanghai Night”: From a formal dinner party to a humble wonton shop on the street corner, the understated night perfectly complements the unpretentious conversation. What is destined cannot be changed, but we still possess small yet powerful wills that gleam like a gentle breeze, illuminating the calmest and most ordinary parts of ourselves.

“Summer on the Other Shore”: The portrayal of the marginalized reminds me repeatedly of “Is Your Summer Okay?” Yet compared with Kim Aeran, Mo Yin’s text is calmer and more resilient. The women in her stories do not lose their true selves amid life’s ups and downs; they continue to walk along the paths they have chosen for themselves. Like those short haiku, every syllable is a tenacious act of resistance against a constricted existence.

“The Person in the Cabinet”: The growth of a young person does not always unfold in loud, boisterous bursts; more often, it unfolds quietly, as the individual steadily rises. Years later, when we reopen this dark cabinet of memory, the “mysteries of the adult world obscured by the mundane” remain vividly visible, and the “loneliness with no exit” still surges within.

— Reader Li Wu

★ This is a collection of finely crafted slices of contemporary urban life and the inner worlds of women, inviting you to pause and listen to the quiet whispers from the hidden corners of your own heart—whispers often drowned out by the noise of the outside world.

★ As a woman herself, the author draws on her keen insight to capture, in seemingly ordinary conversations and scenes, the subtle tremors deep within the human psyche. In each story, the “she” at the center confronts injustice, violence, and the fate of being left behind. The six stories function like a six-sided prism, refracting the complex spectrum of contemporary life: from Shanghai to Tokyo, from nostalgic scenes at the turn of the millennium to speculative visions of the near future.

★ Mo Yin is not only a writer but also an accomplished translator with a profound understanding of Japanese literature. She has translated works by several prominent Japanese authors, including Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, and Jikken Setouchi. This deep cross-cultural immersion infuses her writing with a unique quality: it is firmly rooted in China’s vibrant social reality while resonating subtly with contemporary Japanese literature, giving her narratives an inherently international rhythm.

Her Life is a new collection of novellas and short stories by Mo Yin, featuring six works: “Shanghai Night,” “Summer on the Other Shore,” “Dream City,” “Bamboo Has No Heart,” “The Person in the Cabinet,” and “The Moon in the Tongue.”

“Shanghai Night”: The best form of revenge is to write exactly what you want to write.
“Summer on the Other Shore”: Under the neon lights of Tokyo, search for an exit from the labyrinth of life.
“Dream City”: Life is like a pre-scripted dream—everyone is an actor, dutifully playing out their role according to the script.
“Bamboo Has No Heart”: Memory is a river that carries you back to the past, where you can see your true self.
“The Person in the Cabinet”: Whose secrets are hidden in the cabinet of youth?
“The Moon in the Tongue”: As love fades away, the truths of life gradually come to light.

From texts, personal experiences, and other sources, she gathers one “she” after another and weaves them into the world of her fiction. In Mo Yin’s writing, her protagonists stroll from Shanghai to Tokyo, journey from the future back to the turn of the millennium; some grow up overnight in the mist of youth, while others, trapped in the quagmire of marriage, seem as innocent as infants. Almost every “she” confronts injustice, violence, and the fate of being abandoned—but fortunately, they possess free will and the experience of love, adding an extra layer of certainty amid the myriad impermanent paths of human life.

Moyin

She is both a prolific novelist and a highly accomplished translator of Japanese literature. This dual identity lends her work a distinctive blend of introspection and an external, other-centered perspective, while her writing style remains clean, restrained, and remarkably versatile.

She has published novels including “Jiama,” “Stars in the Abyss,” “Sixty Springs in a Single Character,” and “The Stalker.” Her works often focus on themes such as memory, trauma, and the sense of displacement experienced by individuals in the face of historical and societal change.

In her translation work, she has immersed herself in modern and contemporary Japanese literature, bringing to Chinese readers the works of many influential Japanese authors, including “Tada’s Convenience Store in Front of Maboro Station,” “Snow Apprentice,” “Kyoto’s Normal Body Temperature,” “Childhood Friends,” “Daily Notes,” and “Fuji Diary,” among others.

Shanghai Nights 001
Summer on the Other Shore 061
Dream City 117
Bamboo Has No Heart 181
The Person in the Cabinet 259
Moon in the Tongue 311
Afterword: The Necessity of Reshaping Memory 344

Afterword by the Author (Excerpt)

The six stories in this collection span my creative output from late 2019 to autumn 2023—a period of nearly four years—and in that sense, it almost feels as though I’ve been writing at a very slow pace.

This book, “Her Life,” as the title suggests, focuses its narrative on “her.” In each story, the female characters possess their own distinct trajectories and personalities. For me, the act of writing is a series of journeys to reshape memory. From texts, personal experiences, and other sources, I gather one “her” after another, weaving these impressions into fictional forms, in an attempt to capture the corners and fragments of our era.

At its core, the novel—a flawed yet imperfect form of storytelling—is a quest to salvage and reconstruct memories: my own, those of others, and the shared memories of humanity. In a sense, the six stories collected in this book are themselves aggregates of the memories of various “hers.”

“At Night in Shanghai” may at first glance appear to be a story about writing. On a night at the Shanghai Book Fair, three creators—two foreign writers and a Chinese editor who is an unsuccessful online fiction author—engage in conversation about “fate and free will.” As they tell stories around this theme, what emerges is not only the distinct creative paths of each character but also the unique backgrounds and histories of the women involved. The long-buried betrayal in the protagonist Gong Qingyang’s heart is finally brought to light, and her final words—“To free will!”—resonate like the whistle of a writer setting sail anew.

Some of the details in “The Person in the Cabinet” are drawn from my own experience working as a sales clerk. I did not write this story out of nostalgia, but rather to revisit an era that has just passed—a time when it seemed that anything was possible. Strangely, the character Xinxin in the story is, of course, entirely different from Qiong, whom I once knew, yet in Xinxin I seem to catch a fleeting glimpse of a certain resemblance—perhaps stemming from the resilience that “she” inadvertently reveals.

“The Moon in the Tongue” is set in the most recent time frame, depicting how a woman with a child struggles to rebuild the order of her daily life after her marriage has fallen into ruin.

The process of writing this book overlapped with my work translating four other books: “Childhood Sweethearts,” “Daily Notes,” “Dizzy Stroll,” and “Fuji Diary.” The three additional pieces included in this volume can be seen as extensions of that translation work.

“In Summer on the Other Shore” is set in Tokyo and imagines what it would be like if Higuchi Ichiyō and her sister were living in modern Japan. “Dream City” takes its starting point in the way Yūko Takeda’s “Fuji Diary” might evolve as a text read in some future world. In “Take Moto Mushin,” every character can be traced back to figures from the Japanese literary scene of decades past; even so, the novel’s characters—especially the women—still carry within them the shadow of someone we know in our own time.

If, as you read, you feel a sense of familiarity, it means my efforts have not been in vain. We rush through life, and some people accompany us only for a brief stretch; the fragments of their lives become part of us, quietly evoked in certain moments. I believe this, too, is the enduring significance of reading novels in our present day.