![]() I was surprised at first, then, to find Baorun and Liu Sheng the focus of the early events, but as the plot develops it becomes clear that Su Tong is exploring male sexual violence and Miss Bai, who later becomes pregnant by a Taiwanese businessman, becomes the most developed, most complicated character as she navigates an unwanted pregnancy and the shadow of Baorun and Liu Sheng’s violence. ![]() As well as usually writing in a historical 20 th century setting, Su Tong usually focuses his stories on women and is often lauded for his portrayals of women. It derives its motion entirely from the agency and reagency of the three characters that Su Tong has convincingly built – each of them acts as you would expect, and each of them is fully realised. The tone, too, is highly changeable – at times cynical and funny, at times horrifying, and ultimately melodramatic. The plot is quick and propulsive, although somewhat aimless until the event that defines the three characters. At the end of the first part in a tense encounter between the three characters, Liu Sheng rapes Fairy Princess (and cooks her rabbits), blaming Baorun who is sent to prison for ten years, and the three characters continue to circle each other, inescapably bound together and to Red Toon Street. ![]() ![]() Liu Sheng is a notorious local butcher who initially asks Baorun to tie up his wayward sister. Fairy Princess, who was raised in the grounds of the hospital by the hospital’s gardener (the patients would give her their pills in the place of candy), is wilful and naturally hostile. Through looking after his grandfather, the lonely and repressed Baorun discovers a knack – or is it a fetish? – for tying people up. The three are linked by the Jingting Mental Hospital, at which Baorun’s grandfather is a patient after ‘losing his soul’ (a metaphor used throughout – madness is never far from the surface). The book tells the story in three parts, with each character taking it in turn to be the focus of perspective. Shadow of the Hunter is a contemporary setting (which is somewhat unusual for Su Tong), focused on three inhabitants of ‘poverty-stricken, run-down’ Red Toon Street: Baorun, Liu Sheng and Fairy Princess (later Miss Bai). ![]()
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