Purple Perilla

About

A primary school teacher receives an anonymous love letter and tumbles into an adventure both physical and spiritual. A teenage boy is entrusted by an old beggar to find a lost world where humans and ants live together. A child encounters five wolves in hallucinations and decides never to return from the hills. Can Xue’s three linked stories move from the urban centre outward into wilderness, each protagonist drawn further from the knowable world and deeper into something that resists interpretation. Her prose is lyrical and disorienting in equal measure — not surrealism exactly, but the logic of fable applied to modern life, where transformation is always possible and never safe. These are stories about the magnetic pull of the irrational, written by a writer who has never believed that reality is the most interesting thing happening.