Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature brings me warm childhood memories and takes me back to Taiwan, at the very beginning of the 1980s, when children's literature was predominantly Grimm's Fairy Tales and works by Hans Christian Andersen rendered in Chinese translation. This was when I read “The Marriage of the Mouse” for the very first time. I vividly remember—in words and in pictures—how the mouse parents consider the sun, the cloud, the wind, and the wall as candidates for their son-in-law. Who would have known that decades later I would encounter this tale again, thanks to its scholarly translation in English by Professor Wilt Idema?
Indeed, over the years, in a series of monographs that combine masterful translations with erudite and witty cultural-historical scholarship, Idema has published a slew of sources, with particular emphasis on entertainment and popular literature traditionally excluded from elite traditions, such as Judge Bao...
