At one point in the story, his grandmother's body is removed from the mass grave to be given a proper burial. The narrator's memories are clouded and detached with a fable-like quality to them. Thus, his grandmother takes over the business, and the narrator recounts in another memory the reasons why their wine is so good. Because his grandfather, who was a bandit, had already fallen in love with her, he murders the distillery owner's son. He describes how his grandmother was forced to marry the son of a rich distillery owner. As the story progresses, the unnamed narrator (the grandson of Commander Yu) reminisces about the history of his family and the conflicts they participated in during the war. Her death forges a link in the novel between the past and the present. However, as his wife makes her way through the sorghum fields with food for the soldiers, she is shot and killed by the Japanese. At the story's opening, Commander Yu prepares his soldiers to attack the invading Japanese army. It was adapted into an Oscar nominated film in 1987. Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, and Red Sorghum is typically considered his best novel. Mo Yan, which translates in English as 'don't speak,' is the pen name of Guan Moye.

Set in China from the 1920s to the 1970s, the novel plays with time, non-chronologically telling the story of three generations of the Shandong family as they transition from sorghum wine makers to resistance soldiers during the Second Shino-Japanese War. Published in 1986, Red Sorghum is a magical realism novel written by Mo Yan.

Red sorghum book