Year 27 of the Zhaoguo calendar.
The railways are open, telegraph lines are up, and newspapers carry thousands of names to every corner of the country each day.
For more than twenty years, the New Policies have worked to register the population and standardize place names, trying to restore order to a country ravaged by war.
Lin Shu, a clerk in the civil registry office of Chengchuan County, spends each day adding the newly born to the registers and removing the dead.
He has always believed that written records can be wrong and people can lie, but if every record is checked against the others, the truth can always be found.
Until one day, he unearths a death register from twenty-three years ago.
The deceased's name, age, place of origin, and burial site are all recorded in full.
But that person is still alive.
He has a wife and children, a shop, and neighbors. People call him by name every day.
Stranger still, every piece of evidence proving that he is alive is also true.
Lin Shu begins investigating the discrepancy.
Genealogies, old registers, temple records, newspapers, photographs...
Gradually, he discovers that when some people's names are written down incorrectly, they lose more than just their identities.
And when he finds his own name in an old, dust-covered file, he realizes for the first time:
Everyone in this world knows his name is Lin Shu.
But that doesn't mean anyone can really prove that "Lin Shu" is him.
