The Strange Tales Teahouse

At twenty-nine, Su Qingyuan was laid off. She returned to Jinan to take over a teahouse left by her great-grandfather, intending only to sell the courtyard and use the money to move back to the city.

A realtor offered 1.2 million yuan. The property deed listed it as a traditional-style building, which meant it could be renovated but not demolished. The first thing she did after entering was empty the ashes from the incense burner. They were warm.

A kite came crashing down, and blood dripped into the blank book in the cabinet. A line appeared on the page: First account: recover the lost melody by Daming Lake.

From that day on, she could see the things waiting inside the teahouse. An account book lay before her, with only three rules: names could be deposited, pawned, or eaten; the book recognized only seals and strokes, and "writing a name on paper counts as half a stroke, while writing it on a person counts as a whole one"; every entry had to be paid for.

The teahouse was minded by a weasel that had drunk tea for thirty years, while a Taoist priest from Laoshan sat by the entrance. Over the next year, she turned the pages of the account book one by one: the bronze bell at Bixia Temple on Mount Tai, the woodblock New Year prints of Yangjiabu, the eighteen locks at the paper effigy shop west of town, and a blue jacket that had hung in the South Street tailor shop for thirty-one years. Someone traded away their name and forgot who they were waiting for. Someone else spent a lifetime walking the roads for eleven people, remembering the routes and the hands, but not the faces.

At first, all she wanted was to sell the house. Later, she began helping people reclaim their names, one by one.

The people of Qilu treat words as contracts. In this book, names are accounts.