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Download the new version Journey to the West12/31/2023 ![]() I open this review with a hat tip to Star Wars, in part because trying to offer a plot synopsis of Monkey King in a thousand-word essay would be like trying to capture Lucas’s oeuvre within the same confines-the result would be something bloodless and boring like “A band of unlikely, supernatural and flawed heroes join forces for a quest seeking the Holy Grail of their era, sacred Buddhist sutras far away in the West. … it was such a disgrace for a man of literary reputation to produce a novel in the vulgar tongue that the story was published anonymously. ![]() And “anonymous” because, as scholar and eventual Ambassador to the United States, Hu Shih, suggests in his introduction to the venerable Arthur Waley translation of 1943: ![]() “Assembled” because Monkey King, or Journey to the West (c 1580), is in substantial part a collection of the folk tales of many previous centuries, based on the legendary journeys of a T’ang Dynasty (618-906) monk, Tripitaka. Centuries ago, in an empire far far away, an anonymous journeyman scribe authored and assembled a picaresque that became one of China’s most revered and influential literary works.
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