Fiction: The opening paragraph of Stick Out Your Tongue portrays a mountain road, complete with army trucks struggling up to a 5,000-metre pass and a lake whose still surface "mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water".
It is picture-postcard Tibet, and it chimes perfectly with the popular image of that country as a mystical Shangri-La: a beautiful, benign place peopled by thoughtful peasants and impeccably intellectual monks. And having achieved this in one paragraph, Ma Jian explodes the image in the rest of this slim volume, whose five stories portray - in terse, spare prose - a world of horrifying poverty, superstition and brutality.
A book about Tibet by a Chinese writer would be unusual under any circumstances, but the circumstances surrounding the publication of this book are extraordinary indeed. In an afterword as engrossing (and shocking) as the stories themselves, Ma Jian describes how, in February 1987, he switched on his TV just in time to see the book review from hell: an official newsreader denouncing his debut novel as "a vulgar, obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots. Ma Jian fails to depict the great strides the Tibetan people have made in building a united, prosperous and civilised Socialist Tibet. . .".
The book was duly banned, and Ma Jian, who had already moved to Hong Kong to escape Deng Xiaoping's crackdown on cultural openness, settled - if that's the right word - in London. A memoir of his Tibetan journey, Red Dust, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book award in 2002 and was followed by a novel, The Noodle Maker; and Ma Jian has been hailed by the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian as "one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature".
As a voice, it is certainly distinctive. The narrator of Stick Out Your Tongue is a Han Chinese who is travelling around Tibet with a camera and a notebook, reporting - with an attention to detail worthy of a documentary film-maker - on the country's life and customs. Thus the stories deal with a sky burial, a pilgrimage, a young nomad trying to find his family in the high pastures, a Buddhist initiation rite, and so forth. The devil, of course, is in the details: and the tone is about as far from that of a documentary as you could find.
It is deadpan, yet shot through with subtle empathy and flashes of humour: surreal and unearthly, yet steeped in a physicality so immediate that I flinched on at least one occasion, ducking instinctively away from the page on reading - for example - the sentence which begins: "When the elder brother dug his knife into Miyima's chin and drew it up her face. . ."
The reality of Ma Jian's "sky burial" is a million miles from the romantic image suggested by the English phrase. The notion of "pilgrimage", too, is subverted by an element of incestuous abuse. It's easy to see why, branded "pornographic" by the Chinese government, the stories sold well on the Beijing black market in the 1980s - and were even hand-copied by enthusiastic entrepreneurs.
However, for a reader who has always cherished the idea that Buddhism, unlike the world's other great spiritual traditions, does not sponsor misogyny, the most disturbing aspect of the book is not the violence which tends to erupt at moments of apparent tranquillity, or even its remorselessly black take on sexuality, but its portrait of the misery endured by Tibetan women. This may be fiction taken to Kafka-esque extremes and then exaggerated, but it is still, to a striking extent, the women who bear the brunt. The final story, appropriately called The final initiation, is particularly dreadful in this regard.
But it is also, and this is Ma Jian's genius, particularly beautiful. His lean style comes into its own: not only is there not a single wasted word, but the final image lingers, and lingers, and lingers in the mind. Stick Out Your Tongue is apparently in the vanguard of a huge army of books from China due to invade our shelves. If the rest are as outstanding as this one, it's going to be some year.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
Stick Out Your Tongue By Ma Jian Chatto & Windus, 90pp. £10
