The Painted Skin
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, or Liaozhai Zhiyi, is a collection of Classic Chinese stories by Pu Songling, comprising close to five hundred "marvel tales". Dating back to the Qing dynasty, its earliest publication date is given as 1740. Since then, many of the critically lauded stories have been adapted for other media such as film and television, including the films A Chinese Ghost Story and A Touch of Zen.
This book provides examples of:
- Action Girl: "Xia Nü", which involves a female swordmaster who kills a fox spirit and assassinates a man who wronged her in the past. This story was the inspiration for A Touch of Zen.
- All Just a Dream: "A Sequel to the Yellow Millet Dream".
- All Women Are Lustful: The fox spirits.
- Asian Fox Spirit: 86 stories feature Chinese fox spirits, most of whom pose as human women in order to deceive humans.
- Back from the Dead: Several stories.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: The wife of "The Fornicating Dog" starts engaging in sexual activities with her pet dog while her husband is away for long periods of time.
- Bowdlerise: As noted in the Other Wiki
, the oldest English version of the book is this due to Herbert Giles' (translator) upbringing during the Victorian era. Some contents were censored to fit his era standards such as changing the stories about fox spirits seducing and having sex to chatting and having tea with people. - Cannot Cross Running Water: According to "The Fox of Fenzhou," foxes cannot cross rivers. The eponymous fox spirit pleads to the local River God for permission to cross it, and he grants it for a time limit of ten days, after which she has to return to her homeland.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: Features in many stories, in "An Otherworldly Examination" they're shown to have similar testing practices to the earthly Imperial Bureaucracy.
- Divine Misfile: One character is accidentally taken to Hell prematurely and sent back just as Yama is attaching his next life's skin.
- Doorstopper: Pu Songling collected about 500 supernatural stories. Sidney L. Sondergard's complete translation is around 2,400 pages long, divided into 6 volumes.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: Many law-breakers are executed by lingchi.
- Foxy Vixen: Many of the stories about foxes feature them shapeshifting and seducing human men, and sometimes falling in love with them. Usually they assume the form of beautiful women, but "The Cut Sleeve" and "Xia Nü" both feature male foxes seducing men.
- Full-Body Disguise: The Painted Skin features one of the earliest known examples of this trope, in which a hideous green ghoul wears a human pelt that it pains to resemble both a young woman and an old hag.
- God Job: In "An Otherwordly Examination", a good official is promoted to godhood, although he gets a delay of nine years so he can look after his aging mother until she dies.
- Half-Human Hybrid: A result of a human-spirit romance.
- Interspecies Romance: Several stories involve humans falling in love with spirits.
- Kid Hero: "The Merchant's Son" stars a 10 year old kid who saves his mother from a fox spirit by means of trickery.
- Master of Illusion: One short story revolves around a pear-seller (who's a bit of a rude jerkass) wheeling a cart of overpriced pears in the market, and shooing off an old Taoist monk who asks for alms. The monk then pranks the seller by casting a spell which causes a pear tree to magically grow in the middle of the marketplace, and then plucking all the pears and distributing them to everyone before leaving. As soon as the monk is out of sight, the tree disappears, and the seller realize in horror that his cart, previously full of pears, is now empty. Bullying a Dragon at it's finest.
- Off with His Head!: The fate of the demon in "The Painted Skin".
- Our Vampires Are Different: "The Blood-Drinking Corpse" contains a variant which is either a Chinese Vampire or an unusual take on the vampire mythos. A Nameless Narrative story, it involves four travelling scholars arriving at at inn and learning they have to spend a night in a room containing a dead woman who was supposed to be buried the following day. Lacking options, they four men agreed, but in the dead of night the woman's corpse unexpectedly revives and starts draining the life from the scholars (by breathing on her victims, rather than biting), killing three men while the last one managed to wake up in time. Fleeing from the inn with the lady vampire in pursuit, the last man managed to dodge the lady vampire's attempt to slash him with her Femme Fatalons, and is Left Stuck After Attack when she embeds her claws on a tree instead. The next morning, the surviving scholar leads the local police to where the lady vampire was last seen, now a motionless corpse whose fingers are planted in a tree.
- Phony Psychic: "Vocal Virtuosity". A female physician hides behind a curtain in front of an audience and speaks with spirits for advice on medicine. The crowd clearly hears the spirits converse with her, but the truth is, she's doing all the voices herself in order to trick people into buying phony medicine.
- Possessing a Dead Body: In "The Monk of Changqing", a monk's ghost accidentally possesses the body of a young nobleman killed in a hunting accident. The nobleman's family think he's just lost his senses when he insists he's a monk and rejoins his old monastery.
- Replicant Snatching: The demon in "The Painted Skin" disguises itself in the skin of a human woman, regularly painted to look living.
- Teeny Weenie: The protagonist of "Silkworm" has a tiny penis. Women make fun of him and say he's not a man, and when a ghost feels him up while he sleeps, she recoils in horror as soon as she touches his member.
- This Was His True Form: Shapeshifting spirits inevitably return to their true forms (usually foxes) when they are killed.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Many of the Chinese spirits and monsters are capable of disguising themselves as humans.
