The Story 故事

原文：

临安人夜行，见灯火荧煌，市肆喧阗，如人间夜市。就视之，所鬻者饮食衣服，与人间无异。然买者卖者，皆面色灰败，言语凄切。其人欲买饼，卖者曰："君非此中人，何以至此？"其人大惧，反走。鸡鸣，市忽不见，惟荒冢累累而已。

A man of Lin'an was walking at night when he saw lanterns blazing ahead and heard the clamor of a marketplace — like a night market in the living world.

He went closer. The stalls sold food, clothing, everything a market would have. But the buyers and sellers all had ashen faces, and their voices were thin and sorrowful.

The man approached a cake stall. The seller looked up.

"You are not one of us," the seller said. "How did you come here?"

The man fled in terror. Behind him, a rooster crowed.

When he looked back, the market was gone. There was nothing but a field of old graves.

文化注释 Cultural Note The "ghost market" (鬼市) is a persistent motif in Chinese folklore, appearing from the Tang dynasty to the present day. The concept is simple: the dead have commerce too. They buy, sell, eat, and trade just as the living do — but only at night, and only in liminal spaces (crossroads, graveyards, abandoned temples). The detail about the rooster's crow is cosmologically precise: in Chinese belief, the crowing of a rooster marks the boundary between yin (night, the dead) and yang (day, the living). When yang returns, yin must retreat.

The Economy of the Dead 死者的经济

What makes this story unsettling is not the ghosts themselves — it is the normality of their commerce. They are not wailing or haunting; they are shopping. The ghost market is a mirror image of the living world, and the horror lies in its familiarity. If the dead shop, eat, and trade, then what exactly has death changed?

The seller's question — "You are not one of us" — is the story's pivot. It inverts the usual ghost-story dynamic: the living man is the intruder, the anomaly, the one who does not belong. The ghosts are not frightening because they are different from us. They are frightening because they are the same.

文化注释 Cultural Note In modern China, "鬼市" has been repurposed to describe pre-dawn flea markets where antiques and curios are sold by lamplight — markets that, like their supernatural namesake, appear before dawn and vanish by morning. The continuity of the term across eight centuries suggests that the boundary between the living and the dead has always been, in the Chinese imagination, more of a curtain than a wall.