Newest novel a rural drama

Reading Mo Yan's latest novel, Wa, or Frog (2009), is both rewarding and unsettling. Like all his previous works, this one is full of action and drama. But while his earlier works created heroic protagonists such as "My Grandpa" and "My Grandma" who waged war against Japanese invaders in the past, Frog chronicles the painful, almost bizarre, modernization of the "Northeast Gaomi Township", which Mo has created over the past decades based on his rural hometown in East China's Shandong province.

Tension and a surprising dark humor come from a cast of characters named after human organs, such as Chen Bi (nose) and his wife Wang Dan (gall bladder), Xiao Shangchun (upper lip) and his son Xiachun (lower lip).

The chief character, "My Aunt" Wan Xin (heart), was seen as a fairy godmother in her youth because she was a modern midwife who delivered roughly 10,000 babies. But as national family planning kicked in, she quickly degenerated into the demon incarnation as it fell upon her shoulders to enforce the policy, a hard choice for the world's most populous nation.