“Why are you all afraid of the corpse drivers?” Little Fly asked Momo.
“Because, because we’re human,” Momo said.
The dialogue at the beginning of the short story “The Family Night Watchman”, between the protagonist, Little Fly, and his friend Momo, points to the existing boundary between the living and the dead, and to the primeval fear humans harbor toward beings dwelling on the other side.
Written by Can Xue, one of China’s most renowned experimental writers, and published in Conjunctions for their 2024 issue Revenants: The Ghost Issue, “The Family Night Watchman” is set during the hot months of summer which, according to East Asian tradition, is the season when ghosts and the spirits of the dead roam freely among us.
The story opens with the image of children escaping the stuffy confines of their homes to lay out bamboo beds in the middle of the road at night, waiting for otherworldly beings to reveal their presence: “Ah, the corpse drivers! Ah, the Spider Demon King! Ah, the Milky Way!”
However, despite their initial excitement, the children quickly burrow under their blankets and fall asleep because “as long as we don’t peek, the corpse drivers won’t snatch us away […].”
In contrast, Little Fly – a small, frail boy of the Guiren family who lives alone with his ambiguous mother, who everyday beats him yet at times shows affection, such as when she helps him lay out his bamboo bed to join the other children – is unafraid of the corpse drivers that lurk the streets every summer night. For this reason, the other children call him the Night Watchman. Kept awake by insomnia, Little Fly is drawn by a longing to journey through the Milky Way (and here I can’t help but think of Kenji Miyazawa’s surreal short story “Night Train to the Stars”) and to finally meet the corpse drivers, whom he considered “kindred spirits”.
As the story unfolds and Little Fly explores the boundlessness of the summer nights dipped in darkness, encountering otherworldly beings that hover in-between, the once clear boundaries between the world of the living and the dead (as well as between waking and dreaming) gradually dissolve. Until the reader, as Little Fly, can no longer distinguish what lies on this side and what on the other.
While Can Xue offers no definitive resolution to themes such as trauma, abuse, and loss that linger in the story as a ghostly presence, nor does she reveal the clear nature of the otherworldly beings, she nevertheless invites the reader to step into a liminal space, where different realities blur with one another, to question what ghosts and spirits dwelling in-between can say about the meanders of the human psyche. Do they only reflect “the fear and bewilderment in relation to death” of Taschen’s The Book of Symbols? Or do they offer a way of salvation, a means of coming to terms with the pain of one’s life?
Toward the end, Little Fly makes a crucial remark when thinking about the living and the dead of the Guiren Family: “They were an odd bunch […], but they supported one another from either side, as though they were living for each other’s sake.”
Perhaps a final invitation to consider how ghosts do not always return to haunt us; sometimes they come back to guide and protect us, and to remind us of the love we hold for one another.
Gessica Sakamoto Martini’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Verse Daily, DMQ Review, HAD, South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), Hex Literary, Ballast Journal, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Durham University (UK) and is a Fiction Editor at Orion’s Belt magazine. She can be found on Bluesky at @gessicasakamoto.bsky.social.