Flowers in the Mirror

The gods behave like humans: they quarrel, gossip, write denunciations, neglect their duties, and for this they are banished to the world of mortals. People behave like gods: they do good, improve their good qualities, and thanks to this, they... become immortal. Handsome men with noble appearances turn out to be empty chatterboxes. The ugly are full of true talent and knowledge. The seller lowers the price of goods, the buyer raises it. Fishes extinguish fires. Flowers bloom in winter. Everything is reversed, everything has switched places, all ordinary perceptions have shifted. The novel by Li Zhu-zhen, "Flowers in the Mirror," is written in such an unusual manner, where historically accurate material intertwines with fiction, and the wild flight of fantasy is replaced by scholarly reasoning. It is not surprising that in the works of Chinese literary scholars, this work has not found its place among established categories of Chinese novels. Continuing the best traditions of his predecessors, Li Zhu-zhen went further than them, creating a work that synthetically absorbed the features of different types of novels (fantasy, historical, satirical, and travel novels). Some parts of the novel "Flowers in the Mirror" have a distinctly journalistic character, especially those chapters where a certain complex of ideas related to the question of women's equality is defended.