Set mostly in Beijing, this rich and strange debut follows Jia Jia, a young painter who finds her husband, Chen Hang, an older businessman, dead in the bath while she’s packing for their winter break.
Horror soon gives way to ambivalence in the novel’s first narrative swerve. But as details of Jia Jia’s four-year marriage emerge, it’s easy to share her relief that “she no longer had to abide by rules made by anybody else”: Chen Hang belittled her art, made her feel she needed to hide a birthmark on her inner thigh during intercourse and that he “would have cared more for her” had she borne him a child.
Yet nor is Braised Pork a straightforward tale of liberated widowhood. She is ostracised by her in-laws – they think Jia Jia is cursed – and the early scenes focus on her new habit of boozing at a wine bar where she makes eyes at the owner, Leo. But the affair soon fizzles out as intrigue focuses, instead, on Chen Hang’s unsettling sketch of a “fish-man”, discovered near his corpse; Jia Jia, recalling that her husband once dreamed of such a creature while travelling alone in Tibet, promptly strikes out in search of clues, as you do.
So begins a bizarre psychological odyssey, billed by the publisher as likely to appeal to fans of Haruki Murakami, and as in Murakami’s novels, the characters’ happy-go-lucky shrugging in the face of wall-to-wall surreality only heightens the weirdness. Witness how, near a lake in Tibet, Jia Jia encounters a writer in search of his wife, missing for a month since going for a haircut:
“Can you help me?” [Jia Jia] shouted. “I’m looking for a fish-man!”...
“Sure! Where do we find him?” he yelled back over the sound of the water.
“I don’t know!”
He held his notebook behind his ear, indicating that he could not hear her.
“I said I don’t know! My husband knew, but he’s dead!”
“Oh, fuck!”
Significance gathers slowly around the title – a reference to Jia Jia’s favourite childhood dish, which, served here, prepares the ground for a tearful climax concerning her late mother’s run-in with her own fish-man, who starts to resemble an all-purpose symbol of malaise.
Poised between silliness and high seriousness, contrasting narrative wildness with cool prose, the novel ignores the conventional advice “tell a dream, lose a reader”. An Yu doesn’t entirely avoid the pitfalls of her approach, not least because there’s a sense that she’s using the in-built drama and pathos of death to overcompensate for how the story’s focus on dreams can make it feel as though it unfolds in an impenetrable private language. But, at its best, this is a debut that gets under your skin rather than leaving you cold.
• Braised Pork by An Yu is published by Harvill Secker (£13.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
