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This essay notes the return of ghosts to the contemporary literary landscape
and argues that contemporary literary ghosts are primarily historical ghosts,
illustrative not of awe for the unknown, or concern over individual morality but of
awareness of the problematic of modernity and anxiety over dispossession and
moral responsibility. This essay analyzes Yu Hua’s ghost fiction The Seventh Day
(2013) and argues that it not only evokes familiar elements of the zhiguai genre,
such as issues of rites, boundary and time, but also reworks these elements
responding to a new historical context and addressing new concerns Ghosts in The
Seventh Day neither abide to the historical time of development nor enter the
cyclical time of reincarnation Their final place of rest, the land of the unburied,
evinces a utopian impulse which must be understood in connection with the dystopian
vision of the mundane world.