Kavi Reads

Given my previous choices, this was quite an unusual one for me. Chinese mythology is not something I regularly read, or really know anything about. Yet, somehow, the book completely grabbed my attention, so much so that I finished it before the two books I was already reading. I didn’t really remember how it got on my to-read list at first until I saw it was another Reese Witherspoon Book Club selection from a few months ago. Full of vivid dreams, shape-shifting tigers, severed fingers, complex sibling relationships, otherworldly connections and a possible serial killer, and free of any unnecessary political dilemmas in 1930s colonial Malaysia, The Night Tiger is a fantastic read.

The beginning of the book defines the theme quite clearly, with a young boy named Ren being tasked by his dying master, Dr MacFarlane, to find the master’s severed finger and bury it in his grave along with him. Ren has forty-nine days to complete the task or his master’s soul will wander the earth forever. Already we know the book is not limited by realistic themes. Ren is currently working for his master’s colleague, Dr William Acton, a reasonably kind and honourable British man but a womaniser, particularly when it comes to local girls. Misfortune strikes when one of his past love interests ends up dead possibly killed by a weretiger.

We then move on to our primary character, Ji Lin, a dressmaker’s apprentice who secretly also works at a dancehall (a place where you go and pay to dance with women) to help pay her mother’s debts without the knowledge of her stepfather. One day, during a dance with a salesman, Ji Lin gets her hands on a small glass tube, containing a severed finger. Confused as to what to do with it, Ji Lin decides to ask her stepbrother Shin, a hospital orderly, for help. In a search for a possible missing finger in the hospital’s records, they soon discover that all the fingers that are supposed to be in the hospital are missing, hinting at a larger game afoot.

The book has an interesting way of telling the story, where all of Ji Lin’s chapters are in first-person, told from her perspective, while those about Ren are in third-person, told from an outsider’s perspective. Moreover, Ji Lin’s account is told in the past tense, while Ren’s is in the present. However, Choo achieves this in a very non-confusing way, such that following the stories of all the different characters is not challenging.

A recurring theme of the book is the five Confucian virtues: Ren (benevolence), Yi (honesty), Zhi (knowledge), Xin (faithfulness) and Li (order), each corresponding with one of the characters. Other than Ren Ji (Zhi) and Shin (Xin), Yi is Ren’s twin brother, who died sometime in the past. Li’s identity is a mystery, with Willian as a possible candidate. The five are considered siblings in a spiritual sense and have an almost supernatural connection, to the point that we see Ji Lin interact with Yi, who is stuck in the limbo between life and death, in her dreams. We see a similar telepathic connection between Ren and Ji as well, where Ren knows Ji Lin is in danger. And despite having never met before, their first meeting consists of an almost shocking familiarity.

All these elements infuse The Night Tiger with a gorgeous depth that belies Choo’s description of the book as a “1930s country house murder mystery.” Yet the mysteries of who is running the hospital’s black market for body parts, why Dr. Acton continues to stay in Malaysia womanising even though he has a fiancée waiting back in England, and the identity of the mysterious fifth virtue propel the plot forward.