我年幼时读到一句对"风流"的诠释，曰"魏晋人物晚唐诗"，从此便对晚唐诗难以忘怀。那种斑斓摇曳、瑰奇艳异主导了我在之后很多年里对文字的审美，也成为我第一次拿起笔创作小说时的缪斯。在汉学家宇文所安解读唐诗的系列著作中，前两部以《初唐诗》《盛唐诗》为名，写到晚唐时的书名却是《晚唐》，落去了一个"诗"字。我想，这大约是因为那个浩劫之后的时代有其独特的一种气质，诗即是晚唐，晚唐即是诗。
本书收录了我在2012年至2020年间创作的17个故事，涉及安史之乱期间和其后的若干唐朝人物。其中有身陷时代漩涡中的诗人，有搅起漩涡的政客，也有虚构的文学形象和早已消失在历史夹缝中的小人物。这当然只是我想象中的晚唐，"歌唇一世衔雨看，可惜馨香手中故"。
多年之后我才知道，"魏晋人物晚唐诗"此句出自日本汉诗诗人大沼枕山之手。千年之下，帝国化为齑粉，世纪消失于阴影，而那个时代的人与事、史与诗仍跨越国界，留在人类文明的共同记忆中。如今将此书于大洋彼岸付梓，大约可算对幼时心爱之物的一点小小的回应。
When I was young, I read an interpretation of the term "elegance," which referred to "the figures of the Wei and Jin Dynasties and the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty." Since then, I have been unable to forget the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty. The dazzling and extraordinary charm dominated my aesthetic appreciation of words for many years thereafter, and became my muse the first time I picked up a pen to write a novel. In the series of works interpreting Tang poetry by the Sinologist Yuwen Suoan, the first two volumes are named "Early Tang Poetry" and "Flourishing Tang Poetry," but the book about the late Tang era is simply called "Late Tang," omitting the word for poetry. I think this is probably because that era after the great catastrophe has a unique temperament; poetry is the late Tang, and the late Tang is poetry.
This book includes 17 stories that I wrote between 2012 and 2020, involving several figures from the Tang Dynasty during and after the An Lushan Rebellion. There are poets caught in the whirlpool of the times, politicians who stir the whirlpool, fictional literary characters, and small figures who have long disappeared into the cracks of history. Of course, this is only my imagined late Tang, a glimpse of a world with all its fragrance and rain, sadly lost in the palm of my hand.
Years later, I learned that the phrase "the figures of the Wei and Jin Dynasties and the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty" came from the Japanese poet Onuma Makurayama. A thousand years later, empires have turned to dust, and the century has disappeared into the shadows, but the people and events, history and poetry of that era still transcend national boundaries, remaining in the collective memory of human civilization. Now, publishing this book on the other side of the ocean may be considered a small response to the things I loved in my youth.