Review: The Night Tiger

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars bumped because of the #ownvoices aspect and the sheer beauty of some of the writing.

Yangsze Choo's masterful The Night Tiger offers a marvelous novel of historical fiction, set in Malaya in the 1930's. Giving us five characters who represent to some extend the five Confucian virtues, the principle focus is on Ren (literally benevolence, humanity), an orphaned child tasked with helping to set his former master's soul at rest by reuniting his severed finger with his corpse, and Ji Lin, who works by day as a seamstress's apprentice and by night as a dance hall girl in order to earn enough money to pay off her mother's mahjong debts. Ji, who's night name is Louise, a la Louise Brooks, comes across a severed finger in a vial, in the pocket of one of her dance customers and before she can return it, the man is dead. She's unable to return it to the man's family, so her half-brother, a medical intern, tries to help her identify the proper owner. Against the backdrop of this mystery and the inevitable question of whether Jin has what Ren needs, a tiger stalks the night in the region, raising fear and whispers of superstition about weretigers- tigers who can assume human form. Ren is haunted by dreams of his former employer, Dr. McFarlane, and fears that he has become a tiger, while Jin has equally odd dreams about five individuals who represent the Confucian virtues.* (It is interesting to see how the five main living characters of the story- Ji, Shin, Ren, William and Lydia fit into these roles or embody their opposition. Then there are Ren's brother and Dr. McFarlane...)

While the underlying mystery of the spirit tiger and the severed finger are the scaffolding of this novel, Ji Lin is the heart of this story for me. Choo has given us a smart, loyal, shrewd protagonist. The reader aches for Jin to have better opportunities (medical school for example) and for her to escape the bleak family dynamic her mother and abusive stepfather present. The complex and evolving relationship between Ji and her stepbrother, Shin, was well-written and I was delighted with the resolution of it in the novel because just before the end I was rather upset with the direction it was heading. The novel had some questions that were never quite answered, though I still enjoyed it. This is a novel that immerses us in a long-lost world, delving into the tension between colonialism and the mythos of a culture that cannot be repressed.

The audiobook, narrated by the author, is delightful.

*The Five Virtues are:
Ren (benevolence, humanity)
Yi (honesty, virtue)
Zhi (knowledge, wisdom) - nowadays often anglicized as Ji
Xin (faithfulness, integrity) - btw, frequently pronounced Shin but what do you think of Shin, reader?
Li (propriety, correctness)

I received a paper review copy from Flatiron Books in exchange for an honest review.

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