On an early-winter morning, Old Geng, the renowned hunter of Saltwater Gap, tracks down a red fox that had been stealing village chickens all year. Waiting by a frozen swamp, he watches the fox emerge onto the ice. He hesitates: The fox is aware of his presence and is testing his honor. Old Geng closes his eyes, betrays the fox’s trust, and fires.

Before Geng can act, Japanese soldiers attack from behind, bayoneting him 18 times. In his semi-conscious state, the red fox emerges from the reeds and licks his wounds with its cool tongue. Geng insists for the rest of his life that the fox spirit saved him, keeping a memorial tablet in his home. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards come to smash the tablet but flee when they see him kneeling before it with a cleaver. At public meetings, Old Geng strips to the waist to display his 18 scars and tell the story of the fox fairy.

When villagers announce that the Japanese have occupied Gaomi, most of the others panic. Two men remain unconcerned: Old Geng and Pocky Cheng, a Peking opera enthusiast. Pocky Cheng reassures everyone that common folk who paid their taxes have nothing to fear.

On the morning of the raid, Pocky Cheng is out collecting dog droppings.  group of Japanese soldiers accompanied by a Chinese translator seize him at gunpoint, slap him repeatedly, and then wound him with a bayonet. Pocky Cheng is forced to lead the soldiers to every sandal workshop in the village. The Japanese destroy all 12 workshops with grenades, killing dozens of men trapped inside. Three-fourths of the village men worked in those workshops. Pocky Cheng is consumed with guilt.

Passion is startled awake by gunfire. She is three months pregnant with Yu’s child and worries for the sake of her five-year-old daughter, Little Auntie Xiangguan. Passion and Dai Fenglian had reached a “tripartite agreement” to allow Yu to stay in each of their houses at intervals of 10 days. Passion longs for Yu to come, but he is not scheduled to arrive for another day.

Little Auntie wakes behaving strangely, as though she has suddenly aged. Passion bolts the door, smears ashes on both their faces, and stuffs a bundle down her pants to fake advanced pregnancy.

As the Japanese batter through the doors, Passion’s old affliction resurfaces. Years earlier, she had been possessed by a weasel spirit after encountering a golden-coated, black-mouthed weasel on a grave mound in the sorghum field. The possession caused prolonged violent fits until the Taoist exorcist Mountain Li cured her. Later, she beat the same weasel to death, ending her affliction. Now, confronted by a Japanese soldier with weasel-like features, she experiences possession once more. She bites back when one soldier gropes her. The soldier aims his bayonet at her pregnant belly. Little Auntie leaps to protect her mother but is torn away and flung across the room.

Passion regains consciousness from her possession. She strips naked, offering her body to spare her child. The six soldiers stand frozen, unsure about whether to indulge her offer. The narrator speculates that had she held out a moment longer, Passion might have survived. But when she begins to redress, the soldiers’ restraint breaks. They rape her one after another. The last soldier trembles with shame and cannot bring himself to do the same.

Afterward, the young soldier lifts Little Auntie on his bayonet, swings her through the air, and flings her to the floor. Her red jacket spreads beneath her like a pool of silk. The young soldier weeps. Passion is swallowed by blackness.

Yu hears artillery fire from Saltwater Gap while drinking with Uncle Arhat at the distillery. When a hired hand confirms that the Japanese have surrounded the village, Yu tries to retrieve his pistol, but it is gone.

It is revealed that Dai Fenglian hid Yu’s pistol. She taunts him, claiming she’d given it to Black Eye and slept with him. Yu beats her savagely, but is stopped by Douguan, saving Dai Fenglian’s life. Dai Fenglian collapses at Yu’s knees and confesses she had hidden the pistol to prevent him from riding to certain death. Filled with remorse, he carries her to the kang and waits until morning.

At dawn Yu rides to Saltwater Gap. He finds Little Auntie dead on the floor and Passion barely alive on the kang. Enraged, he mounts his mule to attack the Japanese, but beats the animal so brutally that it throws him. He aims his pistol at the mule’s head before Uncle Arhat gallops up and calms him.

Still alive, Passion whispers Yu’s name. Yu dresses her gently, but she screams at every touch, ranting as during her old weasel possession. Uncle Arhat borrows a wagon, and they load mother and daughter’s corpse for the journey home.

When Yu arrives with Passion and Little Auntie Xiangguan’s corpses in the village, he mocks Dai Fenglian’s resentment of Passion. Dai Fenglian approaches the wagon and registers Passion and Little Auntie’s corpses with shock.

Douguan remembers that Passion had always treated him like her own son, and Little Auntie called him “Elder Brother” in a honeyed voice. He also recalls accompanying Dai Fenglian to Dead Baby Hollow, where she weighed a dead baby on a special scale to gamble on the Flower Lottery. When she lost her bet, Dai Fenglian fell gravely ill.

Dai Fenglian weeps over the wagon, her anguish softening Yu’s anger. She heats water and kneels beside the kang to wash Passion’s ravaged body, patiently wiping her clean, replacing the soiled mat, packing cotton between her legs, and softly telling her to sleep. Grandma then washes Little Auntie’s body, weeping silently, and afterward leans still against the wall, as though she too is dead.

At sunset, Uncle Arhat carries Little Auntie’s body to Dead Baby Hollow. Yu and Douguan watch him from the doorway.

On December 23, 1973, the day of the Kitchen God Festival, Old Geng turns 80. He wakes starving, having not eaten for three days because the village branch secretary, who is now the local power broker, has canceled his pension.

Geng scoops snow into his pot and searches for fuel. He burns his stool and broom to feed the flame. Finally, with profound grief, he pulls down the fox-spirit memorial tablet he has kept for 36 years and feeds it to the fire. It sizzles and spits dark-red drops. The water boils; he drinks enough to revive himself.

Geng trudges to the branch secretary’s house, is told the man is at a commune meeting, and refuses the yam cakes the house staff offer to him. At the commune headquarters, officials scurry with pigs’ heads and slaughtered poultry for the holiday while Geng pleads through the barbed gate. A young man with three fountain pens tells him to go home.

Geng falls face-first into the snow. It feels warm like his mother’s womb. He grows unbearably hot, strips naked, eats snow, but everything scalds him. He grabs the metal gate bars and his hands stick fast. The next morning, a young man finds Geng’s body frozen to the gate, hands gripping the bars, eyes staring into the compound. He counts Geng’s 18 scars.

After leading the Japanese to the workshops, Pocky Cheng staggers home to find his wife and daughter disemboweled in the yard and his son drowned in the water vat. Pocky Cheng attempts to die by suicide, but he survives because of a teenager named Chunsheng, who convinces him to join the Jiao-Gao resistance regiment to seek revenge against the Japanese.

By early spring 1940, the regiment is starving and freezing. Pocky Cheng, now their most fearless fighter, proposes a plan. The regiment steals over a hundred dogskins from Yu’s village walls and rifles from a dry well, then they go hunting dogs for meat and pelts. Wearing the skins fur-side-out, they become the “dog soldiers.”

Their first battle targets the puppet Ninth Company at Ma Family Hamlet. Three soldiers in dogskins stage a realistic dogfight near the gate, luring sentries close enough to kill. The dog soldiers storm the barracks. Pocky Cheng lobs 20 grenades through a window, but the cries of the Japanese inside remind him of the day they hurled grenades into the sandal workshops. Instead of satisfying his vengeance, the scene slices his heart open.

The battle is a complete victory, but the captured weapons are reallocated to another battalion, leaving the dog soldiers empty-handed. Shortly after, Pocky Cheng is found hanging from a tree. From the back he looks like a dog; from the front, a man.

Passion lies on the kang with a gentle smile, but blood keeps flowing from her body. The doctors fail to discern what is happening to her, but suggest that she be prepared for burial. Dai Fenglian sews burial clothes; Uncle Arhat orders a coffin. Passion is dressed in red silk and embroidered slippers, but is still breathing faintly.

That evening Passion’s eyes snap open. A hideous screech erupts in an old man’s voice. Curses pour forth, declaring that her spirit cannot be killed. Uncle Arhat declares she is already dead and possessed. The spirit curses him and Yu by name, making dark prophecies.

The hired workers pour river water down Passion’s throat; she drinks greedily, then shoots it back in a two-foot fountain. Her body arches into sitting position. The workers press a flintstone over her heart and weigh her chest with a spade. Uncle Arhat fetches Mountain Li, the same Taoist who cured her weasel possession years before. The 70-year-old exorcist arrives with a peach-wood sword, peers through the window, and goes pale. He performs a wild exorcism dance, stirs a potion that turns blood-red, then collapses unconscious. When he comes to, Passion breathes her last. Mourners hold goatskin cloths soaked in sorghum wine over their noses. Some go on to say that Passion was still cursing and kicking the lid when she was placed inside her coffin.

The narrator stands at Passion’s grave for the first time in 10 years. He feels corrupted by urban life, using borrowed words to describe life in his hometown. He fears that two separate human races are evolving according to different value systems.

Passion’s ghost appears holding a brass mirror. She holds it to his face; it reflects his urban corruption. Passion tells the narrator that he is lost and orders him to soak in the Black Water River for three days and three nights.

The landscape has been overtaken by hybrid sorghum from Hainan Island. It has replaced the tall, glorious red sorghum, drowned in a flood of revolution. The villagers’ faces, except for cadres above the rank of branch secretary, are the color of rusty iron. The narrator declares his loathing for these “ugly bastards” that assume the name of sorghum but lack its soul, color, and bearing.

The ghosts of his family, which include Yu Zhan’ao, Douguan, Uncle Arhat, Dai Fenglian, Passion, and the woman Liu, send a collective message. The narrator must soak in the Black Water River for exactly three days and three nights to cleanse himself. Then he must find a stalk of pure-red sorghum, no matter what the cost, and wield it high as he re-enters a world of dense brambles and wild predators. It is his talisman, the family’s glorious totem, and the symbol of the heroic spirit of Northeast Gaomi Township.