This time, protagonist Mr Muo is a bookish guy who lugs around “a big Larousse dictionary” and other tomes from famed psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan. The moral vanguard and dream interpreter (yes, he psychoanalyses dreams as a profession) returns to China from France (the land of chivalry, as dubbed by Mr Muo) to save his 1st love from a lifetime of imprisonment. To his horror, the $10,000 set aside for bribing the judge comes to nought as the judge, rich as the latter already is from countless bribes, instructed Mr Muo to procure a virgin to satiate his sexual fantasies.

To fulfil the judge’s craving for the untainted, Mr Muo embarks on a reluctant pimp’s journey in search for the elusive virgin who will be willing (or desperate) enough to allow 1 night of debauchery with the licentious judge.

The antagonist, if you haven’t already guessed, is Judge Di. If Mr Muo is the voice of reason, spouting verses from French philosopher Voltaire, (”I’m too old for that, I have no teeth left.”) in his poetic reply when asked if he writes English, then Judge Di is the uncouth man of the street, with vices including gluttony and gambling, and lines like, “Ah, the pretty little mah-jong tiles, what exquisite freshness – as exquisite as the ivory hands of a young virgin.”

Mr Muo, himself, is still a virgin, causing people to doubt his ability as a psychoanalyst. Although the narrator paints a gloomy picture for our hero with each episode of his virgin hunt, you can’t help but feel for the introspective and somewhat tepid Mr Muo, egging him along in the comforts of your bedroom while laughing along with the hilarity of his situations.

Take his dissection of the life in a female prison for example. The monotony of it is broken by a popular game among the convicts called “Mrs Tang’s weewee”.

“She [Mrs Tang] had difficulty urinating due to a venereal infection. Each time she squatted over the communal soil-bucket her cellmates would jump with excitement at the opportunity to play their favourite game: as they waited for the amber-tinged, odorous liquid to discharge itself from her poison bladder, they placed feverish bets on the degree of compliance that would be shown by her urethra, using as the stakes a few morsels saved from their precious pork rations.”

And if Mr Muo is the attentive scholar of Freud as painted in the book, then he too must know that throughout the course of his journey he goes through what Freud would describe as Intellectualism, that is according to Wikipedia, to remove “one’s self, emotionally, from a stressful event”, which he does habitually through his lengthy and imposing mental discourse on the theories of Freud.

Throughout his journey, Mr Muo meets many colourful characters, each known by their title and not names, like Mr Muo’s veritable first love Volcano of the Old Moon, the damsel-in-distress he’s seeking to remove from the prison, his Panda-dung hunting accomplice Old Observer, or even Mrs Thatcher, the “pockmarked grandmother” and the 1st woman to propose to Mr Muo through a love letter that even included news “about her children and grandchildren, and…parents”.

What made this book even more arresting was the periodic switch from a 3rd person narrative to 1st person writing through Mr Muo’s diary, which provided a refreshing angle to Mr Muo’s experiences. For the virgin readers among us, Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch is a tale of self-discovery and love hidden under the guise of a veneer of lust set in contemporary China, woven intricately by sardonic wit, black humour and a slight hint of eroticism.

Living in France since 1984, Dai Sijie who was born in China, is an accomplished film maker and novelist. According to this website, his first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, spent 23 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and the film version was chose to open the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Price: Mr Muo’s Travelling Couch is available at Borders at $32.95.