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The Book Spirit

Ji-gu Studio stood in a narrow lane inside the Chang Gate, in the trade of old books. Its keeper, Old Kan, past sixty, had a sallow face and fingers forever stained with a layer of washless mildew-dust. The shop held all year a smell of old camphor mixed with mold, damp even on fine days. Old volumes were stacked to the beams, their pages yellowed, silverfish crawling in the seams. Among them was a copy of the All-Things Compendium, a Wanli-era print, its frames a foot and two inches tall, forty volumes in all, its blue-cloth spine re-bound, the title on its cover rubbed white; since the days of Old Kan's grandfather it had lain pressed on the lowest shelf, never once opened — such books were made for looking up allusions, and who looks up allusions now?

Behind the shop a small loft was let to a candidate named Shen Yanqiu, come to the city for the examinations, who in his idle hours copied books for tuition. Shen was an honest, plain fellow; at his desk burned a single oil-lamp and lay a worn brush, and he copied till the third watch every night. When he first came he had noticed the Compendium, its blue spine marked with a damp blot the size of a fingerprint, yet he never drew it out.

That year the plum rains came, unbroken, the eaves dripping in strings. One night, weary of copying, Shen dozed on his desk. Dimly he heard a rustle — a page turning of itself. He started up to see the top two volumes of the Compendium spread open, their characters faintly drifting in the lamplight. He rubbed his eyes, thought it a trick of the flame. But when he looked again, a line of small characters had leapt out: "Idle guest, why copy?" — in neat, fine regular script.

Shen, aghast, took his brush and wrote beside it: "How can a book speak?" No sooner had the ink dried than the opposite page replied: "How can a man ask nothing?" The writing was alive, then vanished as quick. From that night on, at the hour of the rat the book would turn its own pages and sport with Shen in ink-words. Sometimes he asked its sources, and it could cite the classics, even obscure matters Old Kan had never heard; sometimes when Shen wrote a wrong character, it would add a note beside the error in an elder's tone, like a strict master. Shen grew unafraid, and felt rather that a companion had joined him beneath the lamp.

One night, copying the Wenxuan, Shen dropped a character from a line of Pan Yue's Autumn Vigil; the book noted at his side: "'Gengjie' means to keep one's purpose, not 'genggai.' If you go to the exams, carry no error onward." Another time Shen asked of local custom, and the book set down the old origin of the Chang Gate "book-airing festival," which even Old Kan, listening, clicked his tongue at — sixty years alive and never heard it. Shen thought: the one shut in this book may have been some old gentleman who loved his exact scholarship in life, his belly full of tales with no ear to tell, all bottled into the characters.

Old Kan began to sense the oddness: in a few days Shen's copies bore fewer mistakes, and his essays held allusions he had not read. One night Old Kan hid by the back window and peeped; he saw the characters appear and fade upon the book, like fish in water. Frightened, he burned three sticks of incense and bowed, but the book went still. Shen laughed at him: "Old sir, fear not — it is only lonely."

So it was loneliness that had bred it. Forty volumes long in the dark, never asked after, the spirit within the lines had come alive — not a ghost, but a hundred years of ink-breath and an unspent reader's longing. It did no harm, only coveted the give-and-take of a voice, as old friends sit face to face.

Shen's examination drew near and he must leave the city. On the eve of his departure the book turned of itself to the last volume and left a blank page, on which it wrote: "He who came has gone; we shall meet again. May you, going hence, forget not the words beneath this lamp." Shen drew a small seal in vermilion beside it, by way of reply.

Afterward, in Ji-gu Studio, the All-Things Compendium still lay pressed at the shelf's foot, only now and then two or three volumes tilted of themselves, as if waiting for someone to turn them. Old Kan says that on rainy nights he still hears a very faint turning of pages — like a sigh, like a whisper.

After that Old Kan, every few days, would draw a volume or two of the Compendium from the shelf's foot and turn them over in the window's daylight. The book no longer turned itself, yet no longer gathered dust. He said it need not be that the spirit had dispersed — perhaps it had at last met one willing to turn its pages; forty years pressed in the dark, it only wished to be read once.

The Chronicler remarks: A book's use is to be read; unread, the characters breed their own cares. Now men's shelves are full and their hands idle; the ink-breath clots — who knows it does not turn to a spirit? Yet the book-spirit devours no one; it only asks an answer, and is better company than many in this world who sit face to face and say nothing. Read a book, and you sit with a man — what loneliness is there?