“A wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself... a vast, cruel and complex story.”
— Jonathan Spence, The New York Times Book Review, 2008

“Epic black comedy... Mo Yan is a mordant Rabelaisian satirist.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“My favorite of Mo Yan’s novels. His dialect-rich fiction shows how village experience generates an overflowing vitality — what is most rooted in the soil is also most international in spirit. Every time I read Mo Yan, I am reminded of how much I have to learn from him.”
— Lung Ying-tai, author and cultural critic

“In my view, this is Mo Yan‘s finest novel. Magical realism’s cycle of human and animal reincarnation provides a fully realized framework for bearing witness to history. ‘Everything that comes from the earth shall return to the earth.'”
— Reader

★ Mo Yan has said: “If I could have two books endure, this would be one of them.” The Nobel Prize committee made their decision after reading this novel. Douban rating 9.0. Over 2 million copies sold in China.
★ An unjustly executed landlord is reincarnated across six lives — as a donkey, ox, pig, dog, and monkey. He watches his land taken, his enemy occupy his home, his family die one by one — and his hatred slowly dissolves with each cycle.
★ A story told through the eyes of animals. The stubborn donkey. The tenacious ox. The greedy pig. The loyal dog. The fleeting monkey. Five different eyes see five different eras — and every pair sees through to the human condition.
★ Rights sold in over 20 languages. English translation by Howard Goldblatt. Stage rights sold to Russia in 2025. This is not a “Chinese story” — it is a story about people and land, told in a Chinese way.
★ Six paths of reincarnation, half a century, one piece of land, one family‘s fate.

In 1950, during Land Reform, landlord Ximen Nao is wrongly executed. In the underworld, he endures torture but refuses to confess his guilt, crying out for justice. King Yama, weary of his complaints, sentences him to six cycles of reincarnation — he is reborn successively as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey, ultimately returning as a human infant with a congenital condition, born with all the memories of his five previous lives.
The protagonist of this novel is never quite human — it is the animal eyes through which we see.
In his first life as a donkey, he watches his former tenant Lan Lian inherit his land and become the only farmer in Ximen Village who refuses to join the cooperative. In his second life as an ox, he stands by Lan Lian, working the fields under moonlight, rather than join the commune — a rebellion that leads him to be beaten to death. In his third life as a pig, he witnesses the fervor of the Great Leap Forward and the cruelty of famine from within the commune’s pig farm. In his fourth life as a dog, he sees the fragmentation and transformation of rural China after Reform and Opening-Up. In his fifth life as a monkey, fleeting and abrupt, he barely registers before his final rebirth — as a large-headed baby in Lan Lian’s family, with all five lifetimes of memory intact, ready to tell his story.
From 1950 to 2000 — five decades. Land Reform, cooperativization, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Reform and Opening-Up — every historical shift leaves its mark on the land, and every family is caught in the tide of change. Lan Lian spends his life proving how deep one man’s stubbornness can run; Ximen Nao spends six reincarnations dissolving how large one man’s hatred can be.
“Everything that came from the earth shall return to the earth.”
This is a novel about land, and about people. It tells the most universal of stories — life and death, obsession and release, hatred and reconciliation — in the most earthly of voices.

Mo Yan, born in 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province, is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer. He is a professor at Beijing Normal University, director of its International Writing Center, and vice chairman of the China Writers Association.
He was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature — the first Chinese citizen to receive the honor — “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” In 2011, he won the Mao Dun Literature Prize for his novel “Frog.”
His major works include “Red Sorghum,” “The Garlic Ballads,” “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” “Sandalwood Death,” “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” and “Frog.” He has published eleven novels and over one hundred short stories. His works have been translated into more than fifty languages. He has received the French Laure Bataillon Prize, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Italian Nonino International Prize, and the American Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, among others.

Part One: The Donkey’s Struggle
Part Two: The Ox’s Stubbornness
Part Three: The Pig’s Revelry
Part Four: The Dog’s Spirit
Part Five: End and Beginning