Journey to the West Universe

A stone on a mountain cracks open and a monkey climbs out of it. Within a few chapters he has learned seventy-two transformations, struck his own name off the ledgers of death, eaten the peaches of immortality, fought heaven to a standstill and been pinned under a mountain for five hundred years — and the actual story has not started yet. That comes after: walking a timid monk to India for scriptures, with a pig and a river demon for company and a headband that tightens every time he misbehaves. Wu Cheng'en's sixteenth-century novel is one of the four great classical Chinese novels, and this shelf holds it in the versions English readers have generally met it through: Arthur Waley's Monkey, which cut it down to a fast and very funny quarter of its length; later retellings for younger readers; and the standalone episodes, the White-Bone Demon among them, that have always circulated on their own. It is a pilgrimage, a comedy, a Buddhist argument and a very long picaresque about an ego being slowly filed down to something usable. Read Waley's Monkey first if you want the pleasure without the bulk. The complete translations are for afterwards, when eighty-one ordeals starts to sound like a promise rather than a warning.