The intelligible forms of ancient poets
The fair humanities of old religion…
They live no longer in the faith of reason:
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Does the old instinct bring back the old names.

For Chi Zijian, not only does the heart need a language, "the soul of a person passionate about music is capable of giving off sound" as well. Figments of the Supernatural, a collection of six stories by Chi Zijian, is like a piece of music that flows from the depths of the author's heart. This music carries the reader to a world where nature is shrouded in a ring of spiritual light, and the ancient relations of man with nature come alive. Elemental natural forces, tender human emotions, and a rich spiritual dimension all underlie the six pieces in this collection and endow Chi's writing with a special lyrical beauty and sense of timelessness. For these qualities and her delicate literary sensitivity, she was awarded the 2004 Suspended Sentence Fellowship, a literary exchange program that aims to highlight the Joycean dimension of timelessness and continuity in contemporary literature.

Born in 1964 in Heilongjiang Province, Chi Zijian is one of China's critically acclaimed young writers. A prolific writer, Chi has won many Chinese literary prizes, including the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Award. While sharing some of the concerns and sentiments of women's literature, Chi Zijian's unique perspective and exquisite style single her out among her contemporaries. Her writing brings a freshness to the increasingly pluralistic scene of contemporary Chinese literature.

Figments of the Supernatural is the first book-length translation of Chi's work into English. The six stories in the book were selected by Simon Patton, the translator, "intuitively" from Chi Zijian's book Walking with Water (Yu shui tong xing), published by China Youth Publishing House in 2001. In his admirable translation, Simon Patton tactfully retains the subtlety and sensibility of the original.

The first story "Fine Rain at Dusk on Grieg's Sea" (Gelige hai de xiyu huanghun) moves back and forth between the hometown of the late Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and a small town in northern China through the agency of sound and music. From Grieg's music on the waterfront, to the enigmatic sounds of a landlocked town, sound becomes the link between the human world and the supernatural.Listening to Grieg's music at Grieg's home and watching fine rain dropping on the surging waves of the sea, the first-person narrator is reminded of the strange sounds she heard in a deserted country house in northern China, which made her flee from that place. An epiphany now dawns on her: the strange sounds she used to hear in that wooden cabin were truly heavenly music, a song of the human spirit, and she feels ashamed to have tried desperately to rid herself of them. She realizes now that those sounds were "the expression of an unbroken attachment to the human world made by a soul which yearned for life". So she returns to the wooden cabin after her trip to Norway. Once there, listening to those familiar sounds, she thinks of Grieg and his music across the ocean, and her heart swells with affection.

Tender feelings and affection also permeate the second story "The Potato Lovers" (Qin qin tudou). Just as the sounds in the first story link heaven and earth, the potato flowers here create a bond between the living and the dead. "The Potato Lovers" tells a story of a country couple who grow potatoes for a living. When the husband dies of lung cancer, the wife Aijie decides to fill his grave pit with the potatoes harvested from their own field. Through those potatoes, her husband in the other world can relate to things in this one. The sweet and bitter ending of the story is especially touching. After her husband's burial, as Aijie is leaving her husband’s grave, "a round, plump potato had fallen to the ground from the top of the heap and rolled all the way to her feet, coming to a halt by her shoes. It resembled a small child who, accustomed to the doting affection of its mother, now implored her for that intimacy of a mother's love. Aijie gazes at the potato with tender affection and scolds it gently: 'Are you still with me?' "

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