It is rare to find good literature that makes one laugh, cry and think, especially in China where kitsch and sensationalism dominate the contemporary arts scene.

But wait until you read Yu Hua, two of whose novels, To Live, and The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant are listed among the last decade's 10 most influential books in China.

Yu's books have won numerous awards in Europe, the United States and Australia, and have been translated into a dozen languages.

In 2002, he became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. To Live was awarded Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998.

Yu's writing embraces a wide range of subjects and styles, but his overriding themes are dark and macabre - violence and death.

In To Live, adapted into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Gong Li, a peasant witnesses the death of his entire family.

The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant tells of a worker who sells his blood to support his family through the tumult of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

The language in both books is more plain and humorous than in his earlier works and he replaces the descriptions of an inner world he used then with more straight-forward story-telling.

A compelling tale-spinner, Yu draws the reader in and makes you care about the journeys of his characters.

He describes the famine years in a funny but poignant scene with Xu Sanguan, the hero of The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.

Xu makes his wife and three sons lie in bed all day to save energy after eating only corn porridge twice a day for months. On his birthday, he offers the family a "banquet'' by describing the cooking and eating of various dishes.

Yu writes about these "spiritual meals'' - a common survival trick for those who lived through the famine - with humor and pathos.

The book ends when Xu collapses after learning that the hospital no longer wants his blood because he's too old.

Yu also has a knack for describing violence in graphic detail. He does not become maudlin and somehow retains elements of humor.

In an earlier book, One Kind of Reality, Yu depicts a young man named Shan Gang who tortures his brother to death after his brother's toddler son tortures and kills Shan's baby son.

The final scene is about how Shan's body is in turn cut up by doctors - his parts to be used for transplant operations and as educational models. The irony is that Shan's testicles are transplanted into another young man who then produces a son.

The novel ends with this sentence: "As his [the doctor's] work proceeds to the thighs, he grabs the rude muscles of Shan Gang's legs and says to Shan Gang: `Although you're very strong, when I put your bones in our classroom, you'll look pretty feeble.'

Interviewing Yu is like reading his books: Tale after tale, laughter following laughter.

This world-renowned author shows up for an interview clad in a polyester jacket and hunches his back, his hair all mussed up. He lights up a Nanjing cigarette as his public relations woman compliments him on his jacket (Yu is known for his cheap clothes and scruffiness.)

"Inspiration can come from everywhere,'' he says of his work. "It's like wind. Today is a southeast wind, tomorrow is northwesterly, the day after tomorrow is from the east then the day after that it may be from the west.''

What about this environment, I ask, glancing around at the pseudo-antique Chinese furniture in Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents Club.

"This environment?'' He pauses, takes a long draw on the cigarette and says: "Inspiration only comes when I write. There isn't any if I don't write. I don't think about writing once I leave the desk. When I treated writing as a hobby, I thought about it more.''

In a short autobiography Yu said he took a job at his local county's cultural center because he was sick of the "eight-hour routine work'' of a dentist, which he did for five years after leaving school.

Is there any inspiration inside a mouth?

He bursts out laughing, puffing out smoke through his mouth and nostrils: "Ha! You've already checked out my secrets,'' he says.

Born in 1960 in the middle of the Great Leap Forward, it is no wonder Yu is so familiar with the famine about which he writes in Blood Merchant.

The book was inspired by the man in charge of the blood bank at the hospital where Yu's father was director and chief surgeon. The man once organized thousands of people to travel hundreds of kilometers and sell their blood along the way.

"I knew that person, but I can't remember his face,'' Yu wrote in the preface for the book's German-language edition.

"I can only remember the way a cigarette hung off his mouth, his dirty uniform.''

A simple dialogue, a scene, a face, he says, can inspire an entire book. Blood Merchant's hero was drawn from memories of a peasant tying a straw rope around a buttonless cotton jacket, its pocket holding a bowl from which he drank the water which he believed would dilute the blood he would sell to hospitals.

"Most peasants I saw in my childhood were dressed like that,'' Yu says.

Fu Gui, the hero of To Live, was based on an old peasant with a buffalo, plowing a field in the midday summer sun.

"The old man's face was wrinkled and smeared with mud,'' he says. "There were many such images when I was little.''

Yu says his childhood determined his personality and still provides the raw material for his literature. Most of his writing draws upon the three decades he lived in Haiyan, a small county in Zhejiang province.

His first exposure to literature occurred, strangely enough, during the Cultural Revolution. His eyes light up when speaking of those years. He ignites another cigarette.

"My childhood and [early] adulthood were spent in an era when books were hard to find,'' he recalls.

I remind him of the books depicting the Communist revolution that he read in primary school.

He sneers: "You call those books?'' He had to make do with whatever banned foreign books and classical Chinese pornographic novels - often with many pages torn out - he could find.

"Most of the books I was able to get hold of had no beginning or ending pages,'' he says.

He recalls in junior high school he copied by hand the book Camille by Alexandre Dumas Jr. His schoolmates even wrote a sequel.

But he wasn't ready for serious writing yet. He was still too busy reading - spending at least an hour reading Big Character Posters after school every day.

"In the era of the Big Character Posters, people's imagination was explored to the limits. All styles of literature flourished: fabrication, exaggeration, metaphor, sarcasm ... all you would need was there.

"This was the literature I first encountered. On the streets, in front of layer upon layer of Big Character Posters, I started to like literature,'' he wrote in his autobiography.

And some of that literature was about himself. When he was six, his brother asked him to urinate on a fire he had started in a thatched shed used to stage political "struggle sessions'' at his father's hospital. The shed burned down and the brothers had their caricatures drawn on Big Character Posters criticizing them.

"I felt very inferior when I saw the pictures,'' he chuckles. "I thought: Am I really that ugly?'' The family was too poor to buy a mirror back then so Yu thought his distorted face in the cartoons were his real looks. Later he found a mirror on a truck that distorted his image, proving how "ugly'' he was.

His earliest writings appeared in Big Character Posters also, mostly copying and commenting on People's Daily editorials.

In 1983, Yu began to write short stories and posted them to literary magazines in Beijing. By 1993 he was a full-time writer and soon discovered Lu Xun, the leftist writer whose short stories and essays were popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lu became an icon of modern Chinese literature. He was promoted by the communist government in school textbooks which Yu rebelled against but in later years he says he found Lu's work inspiring. His other inspirations were Franz Kafka and Yasunari Kawa-bata, the first Japanese Nobel laureate in literature.

Themes of violence and death also stem from Yu's childhood in the hospital. His family's apartment was opposite a morgue and he recalls hearing the heart-wrenching sobs of grieving relatives emerging from the cool room in which bodies were stored.

"During those years, I heard enough of all kinds of cries, from men, women, the old and the young. I heard many kinds of crying,'' he wrote in his autobiography.

"I must say I wasn't afraid of looking at dead people and I was never frightened of the morgue. On the hottest summer days, I enjoyed staying there by myself. The concrete bed was very cool.''

Writing for Yu is now a process of getting to know his characters. He admits his approach is very different to the one he took in the 1980s. As his style developed, he says, he realized his characters had "voices.'' The discovery was a watershed that spawned To Live and Blood Merchant.

"Anyone, deeply in his or her heart, has the personalities and voices of tens of millions of people,'' he says. "Environment, education and family limit you in part. Then you don't usually see the rest of you. Writing is about discovering it.''

The first voices he found inside him were angry ones he attributes to his childhood during an era of "unprecedented oppression.''

"When the oppression is over, then you overreact. My earlier works showed that. Now I am a bit calmer and my novels are calmer.''

In the preface to To Live he writes: "A true writer always and only writes for the heart.''

He also believes a true writer needs to live a simple life. He dreads his frequent world travels to attend literary festivals and book promotions that take him away from writing.

He says his playwright wife and his 11-year-old son are his greatest critics.

"My son sometimes comes to my chair and reads my copy. He will say: `It's too difficult to read this sentence.' Then I'll change it to simpler language.''

Perhaps what Yu wrote in the preface of The Chronicle of a Blood Merchant sums it all up:

"Writing and reading are like knocking on the door of memories, or they're both about living life once again.''