Cage of bones

WHEN THE Chinese writer Ma Jian was in his 20s, he and some friends went to a graveyard, where they found that some of the bodies, half-decomposed, had become unearthed. But they weren't scared or disgusted. Instead, they got closer. Using a stick, Ma recalls, "We removed the body parts. We wanted to take them home and wash them and keep them in formula."

This scene, which Ma shared when I met him and his translator and partner, Flora Drew, in New York during the recent PEN World Voices Festival, is one that would fit easily into his work. If you've read "Red Dust," about his travels in China, or his fiction in translation -- "The Noodle Maker" and "Stick Out Your Tongue" -- you know that he's keenly attuned to the feeling of being a body in the world. His characters remark on the smell of someone's skin or the odor that rises from between the toes; they feel their bellies swell and their joints ache. But their bodies are always in danger of falling apart: In one story, a woman feeds herself to a tiger during a theatrical performance; in another, two brothers, married to the same woman, carve up her corpse and feed it to the birds in a Tibetan "sky burial." The body can give its hostage soul fleeting moments of ecstasy, but it's easily reduced to something without dignity or grace, a piece of lumpen meat.

Ma's new novel, "Beijing Coma," is equally attuned to this notion of the body as a "fleshy tomb." When the story opens, Dai Wei is lying in a coma, a bullet in his brain. A piece of his skull remains in the hospital refrigerator; soft spongy skin has grown over the wound. He is blind, mute and paralyzed but still able to hear. From his bed, he recalls his youth and the 1989 occupation of Tiananmen Square, where he was shot.

Ma sees a clear link between the body and political repression. As a child growing up under communism, he was taken to execution parades and witnessed people being thrown off the tops of the buildings. "The Communist Party can not only destroy people's souls, but they can also destroy your body," he says. "They can devour your flesh. . . . The Chinese people understand that bodies are made up of little pieces. They walk through the streets and see body parts in the streets. There's no confidence that the body can remain intact very long."