Chi Zijian

It was only late in the day I began to reach for five stars. Somehow it is a slow work, in spite of a certain brevity in story-telling, which it imitates from folk tales.

The author is Han, from China's northernmost province that abuts on or subsumes the grounds of indigenous peoples. Over the course of this novel, Chinese, Russian and Japanese state interests and individuals impinge on the life of the Evenki. By no means always hostile, but steadily deleterious. Several reviews say the book is grim, but I think this encroachment might have been told more savagely than it is. As for the number of deaths -- truly Shakespearean -- our narrator is a woman in old age, and she has the exhaustless array of forest accidents to recall.

The beauty crept up on me. Late in the piece I noticed I was being mugged by Evenki metaphors, songs, observations and succinct word pictures of the taiga -- on the 'Right Bank of the Argun', in the original Chinese title, in the Greater Khingan Mountain Range. The stories, too, work by accumulation, peoples' lives in sequence, with a subtle interweave of forecast and backsight. They are told in a key of realism, but on the other hand the shamanist universe Evenki believe in is real, so that one of the most affecting stories is of a woman called on to save others by her shaman dances, at the inevitable cost of loved ones of her own.

This review on a Chinese site gives an idea of what conditions the author told her story of the Evenki under, and also mentions which tales followed those of real people:
http://english.cri.cn/6909/2012/08/08/1942s715974.htm… (more)