Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou Audiobooks

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun: Chinese fantasy romance at epic length

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.8/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou?

The cover carries its Chinese title alongside the English one, and that detail matters. Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun arrives in translation with its original name still attached, which is how the best of this tradition travels: nothing sanded off, the world left intact.

Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou writes in a mode our shelving struggles to file neatly, with fantasy, romance and general fiction all making a claim on it. That untidiness is accurate rather than careless. This is long-form serial storytelling in which masters and disciples, old grudges and longer devotions are given equal weight, and where a romance is allowed to take precisely as long as it needs.

Volume one is where it begins, and beginnings in this form tend to be patient. Give it room.

Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou in audiobooks

The listing here opens the sequence: The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, Vol. 1, thirteen hours and twenty-three minutes, narrated by Ewan Chun, whose task includes carrying a large cast and a good deal of untranslated vocabulary without ever breaking the spell.

Early ratings run high but remain few, which is what you would expect of a recent arrival with a devoted readership already waiting for it. Newcomers to the form should start exactly here, at the opening volume, and settle in for the pace of a saga rather than a standalone.

The audiobook is below, sample and all.