Qiu Miaojin

An NYRB Classics Original When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note. The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.

Last Words from Montmartre

Brianna Hawkins

You ask me what I mean by “devotion.” Devotion means I give you both my body and soul; it means I place both in your hands, and so in turn I desire your body and soul. And you ask me, “Why you? Why not someone else?” Because I can never give myself body and soul so completely to anyone else, and I can never desire someone else, body and soul, so completely.

What I was burying “with my own hands” was actually my love for you and Bunny. Has my love for both of you really ended up in the ground, with nothing left but fantasy and echoes?

My spirit is decaying. Sister, sister, I’m so lonely. I’ve done my best to live as others want me to, but this time it’s serious. I’m afraid I could die at any moment, that’s why I called you. 

lily lily 

My sorrow, my day upon day and night upon night of relentless grief is not for the mess the world is in, and it’s not for my own mortality; it’s for my delicate heart and the wounds it has had to endure. I grieve for all the suffering it has endured.

I envy you. I envy that you are loved completely by a beautiful soul, and that this love can still grow, still adapt, that it can recover from catastrophe, still vital and capable of giving birth to new things.

Please don’t feel burdened by this. It’s just that I still have so much to give; I want to give you everything there is to give.

For three years I’ve given myself to you utterly, loving you completely and totally. Now my hair’s a mess and I can’t put one foot in front of the other, but I’m prepared to return to your side and keep on loving you.

My desire for someone else could never reach the degree of want I feel for you. Do you know all this? So it’s you, just you. There can never be anyone else for the deepest reaches of my body and soul.

My life is “for” her. I know I won’t ever find another human being so beautiful to me, one whom I love for her eyes, forehead, lips, hair, hands, feet, her face, her body, her voice, her scent, her every mannerism, her expressions when she’s talking, the clothes and makeup she wears, her aesthetic sensibilities, the way she gets along so easily with other people and with animals, which is an aspect of her personality that touches me most, and her perceptions and the spiritual issues she shares with me, as well as her unique natural gift for nurturing me, listening to me, giving to me, and loving me. Even when I feel hatred toward her and scream and hit her, I am painfully aware that for me she is excessively—

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