Written while Mu was attending the prestigious Aurora College, this story appears to be a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s first foray into the treacherous world of modern romantic love. The story follows the troublesome courtship of a female college classmate named Rongzi by a young Chinese man who goes by the name of Alexy. The story itself maps out a terrain of romantic engagements and entanglements across the playing field of the city. The narrator grudgingly and unwillingly competes with many other men who also vie for the young woman’s affections.

Told from the male narrator’s point of view,...

‘Five in a Nightclub’ takes place on one specific day and night: Saturday, 6 April 1932. This story, which complements Mu’s more famous ‘Shanghai Fox-trot’, is both a paean to the glamorous and energetic environment of the modern metropolis and a trenchant critique of modern urban life. Mu begins the story with five brief vignettes of seemingly unrelated characters, each on his or her own downward trajectory. Each character is faced with a difficult problem or situation which appears unresolvable. The situations thrust upon the characters are reflective of the rapid pace of urban life and its ever-shifting trends and...

‘Craven “A”’ is the name of a popular cigarette brand from the 1930s. It is also the nickname that the narrator of this story gives to a dance hall girl, whose name is Yu Huixian. The story focuses on the brief romantic affair between the male narrator—a lawyer and an upstanding member of the Shanghai bourgeoisie—and this mysterious twenty-year-old dance hostess. In a passage famous among scholars of modern Chinese fiction, the narrator begins the story by describing a journey taken by the eyes along the physical plane of her body, imagining it to be the geographic landscape...

‘Night’, the briefest in this selection of Mu’s short stories, begins with the universal figure of a sailor arriving in Shanghai on the Huangpu River, majestically painted in brief strokes by the synaesthetic vision of Mu. The sights, sounds and smells of a hazy evening on the river swirl around us as we enter into the experience of the sailor, who watches from the deck as his outfit billows around him. He appears as a sort of transcendent figure, a ghost in the Shanghai night. The identity, name and nationality of the sailor are left unspecified. The sailor thus takes...

‘Shanghai Fox-trot’ is Mu’s best-known story and, in some ways, his most accomplished one. This story brings together many of the writer’s stylistic qualities to produce a panoramic moving picture of Shanghai during its heyday as the Paris of the Orient. The story moves along at a frantic clip, mirroring the fast-paced life of the modern city.

Mu begins at the city’s outskirts, where a gangland killing is taking place. Judging from the newspapers of the times, this would have been a common occurrence out on the western edge of the city, the area known as Huxi, which also became...

‘Black Peony’ is another of Mu’s many studies of the figure of a dance hostess in Shanghai’s cabaret scene, but with a twist. In this story, the narrator, a man who is ‘pressed down by life’ in the modern city, meets a female dancer in a cabaret who shares his fatigue. In one memorable line, she claims, ‘I’m living in the lap of luxury, if you take away jazz, fox-trot, mixed drinks, the fashionable colours of autumn, eight-cylinder engine cars, Egyptian tobacco . . . I become a soulless person.’ This is a woman who is deeply entranced by and...