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Rating: The novel "Journey to the West - The Monkey" ("Xiyou Ji" in its original language) is a true milestone of Chinese literature; it draws upon a long tradition of legends arising around the real event of the pilgrimage from China to India by the monk Xuanzang, who in the 7th century was sent by the Great Tang to the "western" lands with the sacred task of collecting Buddhist sutras and bringing them to the Chinese court. At the time, for the Chinese, the "western" world, or more accurately what lay to the west of the empire, was an almost unknown world, around which countless legends circulated, much like how during the Middle Ages the collective European imagination pictured the east. Thus, over the centuries, the imagination of acrobats and storytellers transformed Xuanzang's pilgrimage into a journey fraught with dangers and extraordinary encounters. Therefore, when around 1570 the scholar Wu Cheng'en dedicated himself to this work, he already had a vast amount of material to work with. The result was, indeed, a very long novel, which in current versions inevitably appears significantly reduced.
It is likely that the stories were already well known to the public, but Wu Cheng'en added his touch: the protagonist of his novel is no longer, as tradition dictates, the monk Xuanzang, but rather Song Wukong, the Monkey born from a stone, a celestial creature whose story dominates the first chapters; a character eager for knowledge, incredibly skilled, but also stubborn and arrogant, so much so that he earns a divine punishment from the Jade Emperor, the pinnacle of the celestial hierarchy. After a long imprisonment, our Monkey must become a monk and disciple of Xuanzang to accompany him on his journey, also joined by other fantastic individuals: the strong and greedy Zhu Bajie (in the Italian translation "Porcellino"), the mysterious monk Sha Wujing, and a dragon transformed into a horse. Faced with the countless dangers, many of which involve encountering monsters who wish to devour Xuanzang, the poor monk gives way to cries and hysterical fits, like any man who feels involved in something much greater than himself. On the contrary, his disciples always seem perfectly up to the situation; however, in some passages of comedic nature, Monkey and Pigsy, stubborn and full of himself the one, greedy and mischievous the other, just can't get along, and they get lost in childish squabbles, complicating their journey on their own, to the detriment of the importance of their mission.
This journey can be read as an allegorical journey towards enlightenment, where the characters, as extraordinary as they are, simultaneously embody the virtues but also the baseness, sometimes even ridiculous, of the human soul, as in the cases of Monkey and Pigsy. As for Xuanzang, in difficult moments, he cries, despairs, but in the end always finds in his faith and trust in his companions the courage to move forward. Sha Wujing, on the other hand, is the most obscure and taciturn of the characters. Nevertheless, he is mysteriously indispensable for the successful completion of the mission and is sometimes associated with the virtues of sincerity and integrity of heart. The various perils and monsters faced on the journey are, in the end, the illusions that throughout life torment the human soul and from which one must free oneself to achieve enlightenment.
In representing all this, Wu Cheng'en does not hold back his satirical vein; satire that exposes the individual's ills and the social ills of the time and does not hesitate to lash out against the traditional hierarchy of the Chinese pantheon, accentuating some definitely improbable traits.
"Journey to the West - The Monkey" is a fantastic novel, which with its relatively simple lexicon and sufficiently smooth form, has enjoyed and still enjoys great success. The type of story it tells, an engaging mix of adventure, fantasy, battles, extraordinary characters, all set in the scenario of a journey through unknown lands, has represented, in the Far East but not only, an important example, a starting point, for the birth, in the most diverse modern and contemporary artistic expressions, of narrative strands that mirror, if not entirely, its characteristic traits. Sometimes the very protagonists of the novel in question have been reinvented in key roles in subsequent works of all kinds. Consider, for example, the most striking case: the Monkey, in Chinese Song Wukong, in Japanese Son Goku, is in fact the protagonist of the famous Japanese manga and anime "Dragon Ball".
In conclusion, "Journey to the West - The Monkey" potentially represents an excellent starting point for a Western reader who has never confronted a novel of the Chinese tradition.
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