The Last Quarter of the Moon

In this sweeping epic, full of love and loss, a woman from one of the last remote reindeer-herding tribes of northeastern China tells the story of her family and the last century of her country’s history.

“A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.”

At dawn, an elder sits among the birch trees while the rest of her tribe descend the mountain to permanently inhabit the town at its base. A member of the nomadic Evenki tribe, who traverse the forested mountains of China’s eastern edge with herds of reindeer, she tells the tale of her life to the rain and fire, a life lived in close communion with nature at its most beautiful and cruel. Over the course of the twentieth century, her world is pushed to the margins of empire and industrialization. But holding steadfast against the fray of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian nation-building and resource extraction is the elder’s abiding and tender attention to her people’s core relationships—human, animal, spiritual, environmental—which in itself becomes an act of resistance.

In Bruce Humes’s illuminating translation, acclaimed author Chi Zijian renders an Evenki experience of interdependence and reciprocity with the natural world, where wilderness is infused with domestic life and spiritual intervention—reindeer herding and ice fishing, Shamanic songs and rites, and tallies of marriages, births, and deaths. Contending with the preservation of tradition and legacy alongside the threat of progress and displacement, Zijian depicts lives that resist the march of modernization, speaking profoundly to the real endangerment of Indigenous communities and knowledge across the world.

Winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, China’s most prestigious literary award, The Last Quarter of the Moon asserts that all is shared and interconnected, humbly challenging us to bear witness to both loss and wonder.