The town's only coffin maker, Chen Shouzhuo, inherited a craft from his ancestors: carving "guiding patterns" into the inside of coffins, said to help the dead find their way and keep them from straying.
He had made coffins for countless people, but the guiding pattern in the coffin of his wife, who died ten years ago, had a crack in it. He had always felt that she had not found her way.
Then a young woman named Lin Suyi came to him. "I want you to make a coffin for me."
Shouzhuo refused. But the date Suyi left behind was the anniversary of his wife's death.
A coffin for the living brought old grievances from thirty years ago to light: two women had died on the same day, but only one of their coffins had been sent out. Their remains were buried beneath the road, with no one asking questions. The deeper Shouzhuo carved the guiding pattern, the farther the wood grain spread on its own, and matching patterns began to grow on Suyi's body.
Following the patterns, Shouzhuo dug up three sets of remains, and a secret buried for thirty years: the crack in his wife's coffin was not a flaw in his workmanship. She had been protecting him from a road he was never meant to take.
It took him ten years to understand that the guiding patterns did not lead to the Yellow Springs.
They led home.
Book Review of "The Pattern on the Coffin" The coffin maker doesn't believe in ghosts, but he believes in patterns. Chen Shou spent his whole life carving guide patterns - hidden paths on the inner wall of the coffin to guide the deceased on their way home. It wasn't until a young woman named Lin Suyi came to the door carrying a coffin and asked him to carve a coffin for a living person that the lines really started to turn. The most powerful thing about this story is not the monsters, but the "people". The guide lines were carved deeper and deeper, and 30-year-old cases were uncovered layer by layer: the burial that was torn in half, the carved patterns on the stone, and the last guide for her daughter made by a mother who did not know how to carpenter. The background of all supernatural beings is obsession, and the outlet of all obsessions is craftsmanship. When Shou Zhuo's apprentice Xiao Man carved the pattern independently for the first time, the wood grain naturally extended - this was not a talent, but the road was waiting for a pair of hands that could catch it. Shouzhuo is not a hero, he is an old carpenter. The way he solved the problem was to put the wood against each other: the seams of the coffin, the lines of the coffin, the paths of the living and the dead. In the last chapter, he put away his knife and made a new coffin, without any guide lines - "Some people can walk their own way." This sentence is light, but it holds the weight of the entire book. After all, "The Pattern on the Coffin" is not about how to get rid of the dead, but how to let go of the living. The road is open, no need to send it. No one needs to guide you.