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"The Man by the Lake" is a novel that explores the plight of ordinary people's lives and their spiritual world in a realistic style. The protagonist, Chen Mo, is a shopping mall fire administrator. On the lakeside of Yinchuan, he often digests the multiple folds of life with a cigarette: his marriage has completely broken down due to family conflicts and indifference, leaving him struggling between custody and alimony of his son; the jealousy and malicious comments of his security colleagues in the workplace have damaged his salary and put pressure on his dignity. The novel uses Japanese realism and delicate writing to focus on Chen Mo's daily silhouettes by the lake, integrating the pain of divorce, the suffocation of work, and the confusion about the meaning of life into the calmness of the lake and the dissipation of smoke rings. There is no dramatic conflict, only an accurate description of the living difficulties of ordinary people - rifts in marriage, cold arrows in the workplace, and estrangement in family relationships, like undercurrents at the bottom of a lake, continuing to surge in ordinary daily life. In the end, while looking at the lake, Chen Mo gradually accepted the helpless nature of life, showing the resilience of ordinary people moving forward silently in the struggle, and also asking every ordinary person about the spiritual proposition of "survival" and "self".