Mystery Train
Translated by Natascha Bruce
About
A chicken-farm employee named Scratch boards a train to buy feed and finds himself locked in a freezing compartment, hurtling through eternal night toward a destination that doesn’t match his ticket. There are wolves in the darkness. There are women who appear and vanish. There is a figure known only as “the conductor,” who commands worship and obedience. Can Xue’s novella operates on the logic of nightmare: events follow each other with dreamlike inevitability, the body is always in danger, and the rules keep changing without explanation. China’s foremost avant-garde writer — an autodidact steeped in Kafka, Borges, and Calvino — she builds a dystopia here that is less about any particular regime than about the universal machinery of control: how fear becomes routine, how submission becomes indistinguishable from choice. The train has no scheduled stops. That’s the point.
