Notes of a Funeral Master

Shen Bai is twenty-two years old, from the Shen family village in Huaishu County, and the seventh generation of his family to serve as a funeral master.

Funeral masters have no official post and are not listed in the household registers. They deal with the village's less speakable affairs: never answer if someone calls your name at midnight, never descend into an old well, never cut down a locust tree where someone hanged themselves, and never let a shaman collect your birth date.

On the night his grandfather died, he pressed a thread-bound notebook into Shen Bai's hands. Its first page read: If someone calls your full name at midnight, do not answer. Answer, and your soul will leave. You will die.

Just after the seventh-day rites, the first villager to break a taboo went mad. Then yellow paper appeared over the well in the middle of the night. The shaman began collecting villagers' birth details for five yuan apiece. Someone wept beneath the old locust tree every night, and paper funeral flowers appeared on windowsills the next day.

Alone, Shen Bai upholds the rules passed down through seven generations, taking on each case one by one: whose family needs a funeral, whose home needs a spirit exorcised, whose child was called by name in the night, whose ancestral grave has been disturbed.

But gradually, he realizes that every case leads back to the same thread: the missing corner of the character "hall" in the notebook, the character "hall" on the back of a copper coin, Zhuzi, who vanished without a trace twenty years ago, and the night his grandfather sat alone by the well until dawn, then returned and took up this work.

The rules are meant to protect people. But as he keeps upholding them, the one who guards them becomes part of the rules himself.