The First Meeting, a Ferry at Dusk

Ten years can transform an entire city, and it can transform a person beyond recognition.

Su Wan is a gifted perfume restorer, returning to Shanghai from France with childhood wounds that have never healed and a lost memory of scent.

Her one obsession is recreating a mysterious perfume called First Meeting, found among her mother's belongings.

She rents an old Western-style house in the former French Concession, but on the rainy day she opens her shop, she reunites with the owner of the building:

Lu Chenzhou.

He is a celebrated architect in Shanghai, calm, restrained, and distant, her landlord, a man who feels completely out of reach.

He was also the only light in her entire youth.

Ten years later, he stands before her and says in the calmest voice,

“Miss Su, you've mistaken me for someone else.”

He has forgotten her, forgotten their promise beneath the plane trees, forgotten the summer that belonged only to them.

But why does his cool, woody fragrance bear such a startling resemblance to the memories she has lost?

And why does the architectural design for the art museum he has spent ten years drawing, a place called “Late Boat,” conceal a depth of love and remorse she cannot understand?

This is a story about “forgetting” and “remembering.”

He spent ten years building her a city as an act of atonement.

Now she needs the courage to decide whether to open that door and forgive the conspiracy, carried out in the name of love, that turned her life upside down.

“My love is the original sin. You are the only cure.”

Lu Chenzhou