"Once she came home troubled: "Bold, they say that northerners here go to restaurants that serve human flesh. 'Two-legged mutton', have you heard that? Different names for old men, women, young girls, children? Are they really such monsters up there?" "I don't think so," Bold said. "I never met any." She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harbored practicing cannibals when there was so much other food to be had."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), book1, ch.5 – from an episode set in China in the early 15th century and inspired by an actual report of such restaurants (Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–76, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p.135)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_literature
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Cannibalism in literature
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