After a serious car accident leaves her in a coma, a woman on the threshold of mid-life returns to the turning point of her childhood: the cult ritual she and her now-deceased twin brother were forced to attend at age fourteen.

When their father had an affair, the mother of twin siblings Su Fang and Su Ying sought solace in a superstitious cult. Pressured by their mother, the twins attended an exorcism ceremony which traumatized Su Ying, leading to his eventual suicide. Suffering from survivor’s guilt, Su Fang managed to carry on, but the wound caused by the loss of her brother never healed. Su Ying has become his sister’s inner demon, an internal abyss which she can never take her eyes off of. Now an adult, Su Fang feels as if she has finally achieved normalcy, but the abyss comes back to haunt her after she gives birth to her first child. She begins to see Su Ying everywhere, always out of the corner of her eye, always demanding an answer to the same question: “You saw it, didn’t you? You were there. Why didn’t you save me?”


Her nerves frayed, Su Fang crashes her car. While in a coma, she is sent on a journey back to the beginning of her personal tragedy at age fourteen. There, she discovers inconsistencies in the events she recalls. Has she simply misremembered? Is it possible to know what really happened? What’s more, there is always a voice in her coma-dream. Is it Su Ying speaking to her, or just another facet of herself? Or, could it be that someone else has entered her dream and is actively manipulating her memories?


When we are pushed to the limit, it is said we are forced to make choices in order to survive. Su Fang’s mother chose superstition, her brother, Su Ying, chose death, and Su Fang chose to become someone else entirely…


This astounding work of fiction is the debut novel of author Murasaki Fujiyama. Tackling family dysfunction and the dark undercurrents of society, Murasaki sculpts a haunting and unsentimental portrait of a young woman whose inner self has been shattered. No one is free of faults or internal contradictions, and it is Murasaki’s precise rendering of the light and the dark in every character that grounds this sometimes surreal novel in the bedrock of reality.