The Lone Swan

Su Manshu, a monk, poet and painter born to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, wrote this short, aching autobiographical novel about a young monk who goes in search of his lost mother in Japan and is loved by two women he cannot marry. The Lone Swan is one of the first modern Chinese novels: melancholy, lyrical and full of sea, temples and partings. This is a complete new English translation, with names in modern pinyin and the text rendered as plain, readable English prose. It is one of the long narratives that shaped Chinese fiction, full of household detail, comedy and grief, and it reads straight through like any great novel. Few of these novels have ever been available in complete English form, and this edition lets English readers follow the whole story from the first chapter to the last.