Lin Mo has a secret: he can hear the memories left behind on objects.
At twenty-seven, he lives alone and works the night shift as a warehouse supervisor. He lives cautiously, never letting anyone get too close, until a girl knocks on his door at three in the morning.
Her name is Su Nian. Clutched in her hand is an old pocket watch engraved with the words, “Those never forgotten will surely echo in time.”
“This belonged to my mother,” she says. “She was repairing it before she went missing. Can you help me find her?”
Lin Mo takes the watch. The instant he touches it, he sees a scene: sunlight, a white shirt, a woman holding a baby and singing. The memory is warm. She’s still alive.
He starts helping her search.
They rummage through old belongings together, feed cats together, and sit on the curb together waiting for dawn. At a wonton stall, she buries her head in a bowl of noodles, her cheeks puffed out like a hamster’s. She gives the orange-and-white cat eight different names, and it ignores every single one. She asks him, “If I leave one day, will you come looking for me?”
He says, “I will. Until I find you.”
He doesn’t know that he’ll have to trade all his memories for those words.
He doesn’t know that every time he touches those memories, he forgets a little more: what he ate yesterday, where he was going, even what the cat is called.
And that cat sits on the wall, seeing everything and remembering it all.
It just can’t talk.
A very literary book. The concept is relatively abstract. I don't understand very well. Micro-suspense fantasy. The male and female protagonists are very pure in love. Be. It feels like those magazine articles I read when I was a student.