A coming-of-age parable about the self and the other.
At fourteen, Lin Xu created an apparition, Niannian, from the ruins of heartbreak. She was born of his loneliness, a gentle echo of his subconscious, an imaginary lover he used to fight off the void. But when this apparition appears in the flesh in his high school classroom and takes the name Gu Niansheng, Lin Xu is forced to face a question as cruel as it is beautiful: Does he love the perfect reflection he fashioned with his own hands, or this real girl who gets hungry and tired and rolls her eyes at him?
With a touch so delicate it is almost cruel, the novel lays bare the divided inner world of a boy. Niannian's disappearance is not a tragedy, but a recovery: when a person no longer needs fantasies to reassure themselves that they deserve love, the apparition can leave. Across eight volumes and twelve years, the story traces a spiritual journey from "narcissistic imagination" to truly loving another person. This is not only a coming-of-age novel, but also a philosophical meditation on the nature of human loneliness.
In a word: All our lives, we are simply learning how to love a real person.
