I am very fond of the Chinese stories about monsters and spirits, most of which are stories of love or horror between a human scholar and a demon who has been transformed by flowers and trees.
I find that such stories are filled with the dreamlike imagination of a scholar who has studied hard. In ancient China, it was very difficult and time-consuming for a scholar from a humble background to attain the highest expectations of a scholar in Confucianism, the ideal of achieving fame and loyalty to the king and serving the country.
With this in mind, I chose a masterpiece for my composition, which is one of the pieces from the Chinese Romantic poetry collection Chu Shi – Jiu Ge. It is called The Mountain Ghost. It tells the story of the goddess of Mount Wu who waits for her promised lover, but the lover does not come to the appointment. The verses themselves are lavishly worded to describe both the beauty of the goddess and her anxiety as she waits for her lover.
I have created a story based on the words of that song. The protagonist of the story is the goddess of the Wushan Mountains, who is amorous and beautiful. The Wushan Mountain is a view that can be seen from the window of the scholar’s humble abode, but while the Goddess has an endless number of years, the scholar has only a dozen. He meets the Goddess by chance and spends his days pining for her, depressed. He records her beauty in his memory in gorgeous words, but never gets to see her again until he dies. In the scholar’s writing the Goddess blends in with the rolling hills, for he sometimes suspects that what he saw was in fact just the Witch Mountain and that there was no Goddess at all. Years later, the divine maiden reappears, unable to wait for the dead scholar and unable to read the words he left behind. “The ghosts of the mountains do not know how to read, and the west wind does not move.”