Gugu trains as a midwife while still a charismatic and heroic teenager, and begins her career by dispatching the ignorant and superstitious old women who, with fatal effects, have hitherto attended village births. Some villagers grow rich others sink into destitution.

The daughter of a famous doctor, her life spans the Japanese occupation of China, the victory of the Communist party in 1949, the hunger and violent political upheavals of the first 30 years of communist rule and, finally, the lurch to a peculiarly rampant form of state-directed capitalism and the social forces it unleashes. Gugu is 70 when the story opens with the first letter. The short play is finally completed and appended to the novel. The ostensible subject is the life story of the author’s aunt, known as Gugu, which is told through a series of letters to a celebrated but unidentified Japanese writer, in which the narrator declares his intention to write a play about Gugu. Why the title Frog? The answer is a meandering connection Mo Yan makes between human sperm, early stage embryos, tadpoles and bullfrogs that is woven through a novel concerned primarily with the importance of love and life. The novel is set, like much of his work, in his real-life home county of Gaomi. Mo Yan, which means “Don’t speak”, is the pen name of Guan Moye, the son of a well-to-do landowning family from Shandong province in northeast China. A reader who brings an open mind to Frog, the novel first published in Chinese in 2009, awarded the Mao Dun literary prize in 2011 and now impeccably translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, will discover a subtle if occasionally baggy text that does not slot easily into a political binary. It is a pity for those who might otherwise enjoy his work that he was put on one side of a line that he himself had not chosen to draw. His critics argued that his credibility suffered by comparison with others whose opposition was more explicitly embedded in the contest of values and moral claims between liberty and communism, and the Chinese government’s evident delight at the prize did nothing to help. He is the first Chinese Nobel laureate who is neither in exile nor in jail, and discussion of his merits defaulted to his relationship with the regime and the vexed question of whether official approval was compatible with literary excellence. I t was perhaps unhelpful for the novelist Mo Yan’s literary reputation that he won the 2012 Nobel prize for literature.

Frog by Mo Yan