[In the following essay, Ruark assesses the publishing history of Gao's works in English translation.]

HARD TO GET

American readers looking for books by Gao Xingjian, this year's Nobel laureate in literature, may have wondered if they were banned in the United States as well as in China. Until this week, only one volume of his works was available: a collection of plays titled The Other Shore.

The Swedish Academy singled out Mr. Gao's novel Soul Mountain for praise when it announced the prize in October, but publicists at HarperCollins in New York were bewildered when they started getting phone calls asking for copies. It turned out the book, translated by Mabel Lee, was published by the press's Australian branch. The New York office rushed an American edition into print that at press time was due out on December 5.

Until then, the University of Michigan Press has cornered the U.S. market on Gao with The Other Shore, which it has distributed for the Chinese University Press, of Hong Kong, since October of last year. Michigan had sold fewer than 100 copies and had only 50 more in stock when the Nobel was announced, says the press's publicist, Jessica Sysak. Editors quickly requested more, and the press has now sold 10,000 copies and ordered a third printing.

The title play—which refers to the Buddhist land of enlightenment—is a series of disjointed episodes, beginning with an improvised rope game and ending with a crowd of people who utter seemingly random sentences (including, “It's so bad, what kind of stupid play is this anyway?”). Several scenes in which a mob torments a nonconformist suggest not only the loneliness of the individual but also the dangers of collectivism. A note in the text by Mr. Gao warns that “it is best not to resort to literary analysis outside of theatrical performance or to uncover hidden meanings in the text in performing the play.” Chinese authorities disagreed: They forbade the play's performance soon after it was written in 1986.

TALK OF THE TOWN

The Other Shore has since been performed under Mr. Gao's direction in Hong Kong (and Taiwan) and the book is apparently selling well there. Staff of the Chinese University Press could not be reached for comment, but a source in Hong Kong says both Soul Mountain and The Other Shore “are available in all the bookstores and there has been discussion of Gao coming to Hong Kong under Hong Kong government auspices in the near future.”

That source is Colin Day, the former head of the University of Michigan Press and as of this summer the director of Hong Kong University Press, where he is also capitalizing on the Nobel laureate's sudden international acclaim. In a few months the press will publish what Mr. Day calls “the first substantial critical work on Gao's writing (and painting),” by Jessica Yeung, a lecturer in the translation department at Hong Kong's Lingnan University. It is “indicative of the degree of freedom here that Gao's The Other Shore is published by Chinese University Press, who are making a big splash about it,” writes Mr. Day in an e-mail message.

“Hong Kong is still very separate from the rest of China,” he writes. “Of course there is a wariness here about possible threats to basic freedoms and some things do justify such watchfulness. But the worries are about the possible implications for future freedoms, they are not about infringements of present freedoms. I, of course, asked questions about this, but was, and am, reassured that there is a very serious commitment to academic freedom in this university and in Hong Kong.”

Mr. Day arrived in August, after 12 years at Michigan. “It felt time to move on and try some new kind of challenge,” he writes. “Running a press in a new country seemed to meet the requirement!”

As director, he will expand the press's publications (now about 30 titles a year, most in English), focusing on studies of Hong Kong's culture and society and on building the press's lists in linguistics, Chinese history, law, and education.

Mr. Day will also increase the proportion of books the press publishes in Chinese. But he doesn't claim to be an expert. Although he has studied Mandarin Chinese off and on for years, he says now he's just trying to acquire a little “survival Cantonese.”