地府閻羅 King Yama Looks For Horse Face
逐句解 Line by line
in the shrine the city god hunts for his little ghosts, and how shall the fairy in mid-air ride her cloud;
子 takes the literary zǐ in the word for a fairy maiden — a compound of high register, against the everyday zi that the same character takes in words like idiot. 城隍 is the tutelary god of a walled town, an official of the spirit bureaucracy with a shrine in every city.
in the earth prison King Yama looks for Horse-Face, and the judge runs about chasing his headscarf.
馬面, Horse-Face, and his colleague Ox-Head are the two best-known constables of the Chinese underworld. The judge losing his hat is the same official Pilgrim threatened a few passages back.
It blows the rocks off the summit of Kunlun, and rolls the rivers and lakes into a churn of waves.
得 is the unstressed de again, joining the rolling to its result. 崑崙 is the mountain at the western edge of the world in Chinese myth, home of the Queen Mother of the West.
The joke runs all the way down the celestial organisation chart. Star officers bolt their doors, dragon kings close theirs, a city god has mislaid his ghosts, and the judge of the dead is chasing his hat across the underworld.
It is the same bureaucracy Pilgrim promised to assault a few passages ago, and here it is again, undignified. This novel never lets the machinery of heaven and hell keep its face straight for long.
The last line pulls back out to the scale of myth — Kunlun's peak and every river on earth — and then the very next line will be a woman walking up the steps of a small provincial monastery. The drop is deliberate.