Gyeongpo Death Book

In the modern port city of Gyeongpo, on a rainy night, the body of a female cotton mill worker was brought to Wansheng Village. Xu Lingzhou, a young accountant, just wanted to complete the death paperwork, but found that the handover slip, hospital medical records, factory attendance, patrol room approval slip, and a living person's death certificate all pointed to the same set of misplaced numbers. In this city where concessions, factories, churches, docks and old people jointly write death, who a person belongs to after death is not determined by the body, but by the name, seal and number on the paper. Xu Lingzhou must prove that the deceased has lived and that the living has not died before the program is closed. *** But when he finally snatched a corpse out of the program, more living people began to disappear from the paper. Low-grade fever, coughing and rashes in the Huifen workshop were classified as minor illnesses during the rainy season, workers' absences were classified as missed shifts, untested samples from the hospital were retrieved, and witnesses of the shantang were asked to remain anonymous. Guildhall Street, Renji Hospital, newspaper offices, patrol houses and foreign newspapers in the concession were successively involved. An old incident buried by the fire also resurfaced in more and more unmatched account pages. When the workers' mutual aid turned into a strike, and the factory's cut-off affected the concession, the church and foreign forces, Xu Lingzhou realized that what he wanted to complete was not a death document, but how a city writes down the living, writes the dead wrong, and then writes the truth as if nothing happened.