Scholar Daria Berg calls it "one of China's most underrated traditional vernacular novels" and "one of the most grand-scale explorations of the world in fiction", a saga of two families, one a reincarnation of the other, whose "catalog of vices and moral decay conjures up the apocalyptic vision of a doomed nation".

[1] Originally named E Yinyuan (惡姻緣, A Cursed Marital Fate), the novel takes the Buddhist doctrine of karma and vipāka as its basic motif.

[1] It shares structural features and techniques with the Four Classic Ming Novels, such as the 100-chapter paradigmatic length, which is broken down into ten-chapter units, often punctuated with climactic or prophetic episodes in the ninth and tenth chapters.

In the first, set in the Han dynasty, the lascivious actions of Chao Yuan dissipate his family fortune in reckless living and tortures his father and wife until he is murdered.

Retribution for his actions is visited upon his reincarnation, Di Xichen, in the early Ming dynasty, who after failing as a scholar becomes a prosperous merchant and is tormented by two shrewish wives, Sujie and Jijie.

[5] The intricate plot and didactic structure are centered on the Buddhist themes of rebirth, karmic retribution, and compassion but also on Confucian precepts of morality, hierarchy, and duty in society.

By setting the action in the early Ming, between the 1440s and the 1490s, a time which seemed almost utopian, the author can dramatize the following breakdown of social order, with Heaven sending a destructive flood as a warning.

[6] The gross violation of Confucian concepts of propriety applies not only to the relations between man and wife, or between children and their parents and teachers, but is also extended to the other phases of the "five cardinal relationships" as well.