“This is a book worth all its translator gave it.... It chuckles, it winks, it surprises. The Money Demon will do much to show Westerners just why ‘Mandarin Duck and Butterfly’ fiction entertained so many Chinese for so long, and why as a genre, it attracted gifted writers such as Chen Diexian.” —Asian Folklore Studies 49 (2000)

“It’s such a pity! I, too used to think of money and love as entirely separate things.”

So begins this popular autobiographical novel, written by litterateur, inventor, and business tycoon Chen Diexian (1879–1940), a remarkable intellectual whose life spanned the old China and the new. Chen’s novel is the story of his youth, and in it he chooses to focus on his amorous and erotic development—a rare subject in Chinese literature—revealing his passage from innocent boy, surrounded by females, to young man, armed with a new attitude toward money, business, and the women in his life.

Chen’s unusual narrative, intimately combining romance and exhibitionism, unfolds to us an intriguing material reality as well as a powerful emotional world and may well be the first extended account of Chinese childhood and youth. The novel is built on our narrator’s relationships with the central women in his life: his mother; an affectionate nanny; his devoted wife by an arranged marriage; a tragic peasant girl; and above all, the girl next door and his most enduring love, known—after the instrument she plays—as Koto.

Patrick Hanan’s graceful translation brings us Chen’s story at its disarming best, a popular romance that is at the same time original and distinctive in both voice and theme. First serialized in Shanghai in 1913, The Money Demon appears in English for the first time; included in an appendix is “The Koto Story,” a short epilogue to the novel.

Chen Diexian began his literary career in his native Hangzhou and before his 21st birthday had some 20 works to his credit, including two novels, a play, and several volumes of poetry. He had a passion for industrial invention and entrepreneurship matched by a passion for the practice of literature, music, and art. Consequently, he ended up a business tycoon as well as one of the best-known romance writers of this time. Patrick Hanan is Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. He is also the translator of Li Yu’s The Carnal Prayer Mat (UH Press, 1996) and of The Sea of Regret (UH Press, 1995) and is the author of The Invention of Li Yu and The Chinese Vernacular Story.