Kirkus Reviews stated that Yu Hua "is certainly commenting, often acerbically, on how life and death are valued in contemporary China".

[4] In the novel, Li Yuezhen exposed that the hospital treated 27 dead infants' remains as clinical waste which was dumped into a nearby river.

This is similar to an incident reported in the autonomous Guangxi region in 2010, where local police in Liuzhou arrested three people who were engaged in prostitution.

He remembers he was sitting in the Tan Jia Cai restaurant when he read the report of his ex-wife, Li Qing, cutting her wrist at home in the bathtub.

Mouse Girl died after jumping off from the top of the Pengfei Building because her boyfriend gave her a fake iPhone 4S as her birthday gift.

On the fifth day, Yang Fei encounters many familiar people in the land of unburied, including the girl he was going to teach and Tan Jiaxin's family.

She stated that "If Yu does succeed in The Seventh Day, it is in showing a confused society in which the government casts aside its citizens like rubbish and in which people often treat each other no better.

"[9] Ken Kalfus states in an article in The New York Times that the translation is "workmanlike" and that it is "too wordy to deliver its best potential laugh lines.

"[10] David Der-wei Wang, Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, suggested that Yu Hua used the narrative technique of "defamiliarization" to observe the living world through the eyes of the dead.

He also argued Yu Hua did not give full play to the nihilist atmosphere which was the crux of the novel, but only stopped at criticizing social issues.