The reader is left wondering what is real, and what is dream or hallucination.Ī lot is unexplained in Ghost Music, and at times it’s not clear where the novel is going. Song Yan has learned that her married life isn’t what it seemed, and now everything else is brought into question, too. At every turn of the plot, mushrooms are central: there are mysterious deliveries every week from Ma’s home province, which prompt the revelation of secrets from Bowen’s past an orange dust, possibly fungal spores, settles on the town Bowen’s ex-wife lives in unidentified mushrooms grow on the walls of the room Bai Yu’s piano is kept in, where the pianist enlists Song Yan in his quest to find “the sound of being alive”. However, these themes are explored in such an unusual way that it doesn’t read like a domestic novel throughout there is the uncanny sense of something odd, verging on supernatural, going on in the background. The story at the centre of Ghost Music revolves around the struggles of living with an elderly in-law, the collapse of a marriage, and more generally the pressures on women to be doting wives in Chinese society. Out of the blue, Song Yan receives a letter from Bai Yu, her father’s favourite pianist, presumed dead for years she starts playing again and she begins to dream of an orange mushroom that talks to her, and which yearns to listen to Chopin. ![]() Here is where the “ghost” of the title comes in. I stopped caring about cutting my fingers or burning my hands.” Now Song Yan becomes haunted by the life she could have led – the pianist version of herself. This trade of musical performance for domesticity is symbolised in the transition her hands have made: “It wasn’t until we started dating that I learned to cook. Before marrying Bowen, she trained as a concert pianist the life she previously “gave” to the piano, she has “given to him”. Song Yan isn’t grieving for the husband she thought she knew, but for a past version of herself. Song Yan learns that she never really knew her husband in turn, home no longer feels like home, and her sense of self deteriorates. ![]() ![]() Secrets from his past are exposed, including traumas, an ex-wife and a child. Along with her luggage, Ma brings “with her everything didn’t know about Bowen”. That is, until Song Yan’s mother-in-law moves in. F or the protagonist of Ghost Music, An Yu’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut Braised Pork, life in Beijing with husband Bowen is as predictable “as the phases of the moon”.
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