THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Great Wilderness: West preserves one of the book's most cryptic passages. There is a fish withered down one side, it says, called Yufu, the Fish-Wife. 'Zhuanxu died and straightway revived.' When the wind comes from the north, the sky rains down and springs gush, and snakes change into fish — thus the Yufu. And then, again, like an incantation: 'Zhuanxu died and straightway revived.' In a few dozen graphs the sentence is repeated twice, nailing the fish to the god.
Zhuanxu is the Yellow Emperor's grandson, one of the Five Emperors and lord of the north, a constant presence in these chapters: the northern classic buries him with his nine consorts on Mount Fuyu, and the eastern classic has the young god fostered by Shaohao beyond the Eastern Sea. Yuan Ke's critical commentary states the standard reading: dying just as the north wind rose and snakes were turning into fish, Zhuanxu lodged himself in a fish's body and came back to life. The fish is half human and half fish; the withered side is the part of the dead god that never quite returned.
In early medical texts 'withered on one side' is the name for hemiplegia, which makes the phrase a grim pun. Among the book's many solemn 'corpses' of slain gods, this is the sole record of a resurrection. No later text ever picked the story up; the Fish-Wife remains where the classic left her, between the north wind and the surging springs, one of the loneliest riddles in the book.
