THE LUNEFABLE REVIEW
The Tune Missing from the Case Files
In Silver City, a young inspector can see a thing his colleagues cannot. The case moves when he lends his papers to someone who knows a song he has never heard.
THE SHORT TAKE
A thoughtful supernatural procedural with an unusually good use for a desk job. The office is worth getting to know before the pursuit begins. Even a colleague’s idle doodling has consequences.
A desk beside the restrooms
A year ago Li Hao gave up an education that could have earned him a better rank on his first day at the Inspectorate. Almost everybody has an opinion about it. He boils water, takes the teasing and assures his colleagues that staying at school would have cost him two years in their company. The exchange tells us he has a pleasant manner. It also establishes how easily a pleasant manner lets him leave a question unanswered. He has come here for a job that nobody else seems to envy. His desk is beside the restrooms.
Then he takes a sheaf of cases to his department head. One of the old reports is the senior man’s own work. The reported explanation made sense at the time. It takes separate branches, several years of records and somebody patient enough to bring them into one room before the dates begin to look peculiar. The pleasure of this meeting comes when the older man starts doing the arithmetic himself. Li Hao changes what his supervisor can see by changing the order in which he sees it.
Read chapter 2 · Sit in on Li Hao’s report to Wang Jie ↗The names sound different aloud
Chen Na, who sits opposite him, gets a turn with the personal files he has been snapping shut for months. She doodles as she reads. Seeing the surnames side by side makes her remember an opera tune her grandmother sang in the local dialect. She feels awkward singing the fragment in the standard language. I like the slight professional embarrassment on both sides of that exchange. He is the educated investigator who has worked on the question for a year. She is the woman who thinks she may have wasted his time because the list is two names short.
The absence is exactly what interests him. Somebody else’s childhood supplies a connection the official archive could scarcely preserve, and an old family injunction about calling a jade pendant a sword begins to sound different. Chen Na also spots the danger in Li Hao’s excitement a little before he would like her to. She has done more than remember a tune for the benefit of a gifted young man. She reads him surprisingly well while he is busy rereading the page.
Read chapter 3 · Listen to Chen Na try the tune in the office ↗A tile breaking in the night
The loss behind the paperwork is most moving in a bit of physical reconstruction. Zhang Yuan was already in terrible pain when he got out of his room. He broke a tile, woke the other students and moved his mouth without making a sound. A request for help is the obvious explanation. Li Hao has known him for fourteen years and remembers which dorm room he was facing. He thinks his friend used his last strength to give him a chance to run. There is no way to ask Zhang Yuan which interpretation is right.
That uncertainty makes the later calculations about weather and intervals much more urgent. The next spell of cloud cover has a date. Li Hao can ask for a colleague’s help looking beyond his jurisdiction and decide whether to approach the Night Watchers. Here the extensive interior monologue occasionally slows the book. We hear several versions of the reasons these people might help or betray him. The small noise his friend made in the hallway conveys the cost of being wrong in a fraction of the space.
Read chapter 3 · Return to the dormitory in Li Hao’s memory ↗An experiment Panther designs
The neighborhood stray knows to wait outside Li Hao’s flat for food. When Panther crosses the threshold to follow a bowl of water into the kitchen, it means something because the book has bothered to teach us that rule. The bowl has held the old pendant. Li Hao has spent years wearing it through showers, getting scratches and occasionally putting it in his mouth as a boy. He has quite a stock of perfectly useless experimental results before the dog comes along.
The episode has a genuine sense of play. Li Hao has to retrieve a treasured heirloom covered in dog spit, then consider whether the dog knows something he ought to learn. His subsequent exercise session has its own independent witness downstairs. The neighbor cannot see the starlight he is trying to understand. She can hear exactly how unusually long he has been bouncing about on the furniture. The book is generous with these other accounts of what it feels like to live near a hero.
Read chapter 6 · Follow Panther across the kitchen threshold ↗For whoever else is listening
At Zhang Yuan’s old house Li Hao puts a call to his teacher on speaker. Part of the conversation is for the man on the line, who immediately grasps why his former student is announcing where he stands. Part is for whoever may be watching the dark street. This is the office performance again under appreciably worse conditions. By now we know what the rumored quarrel between student and teacher leaves out, and why the sound of a familiar voice might reassure one listener and frighten another.
The quietest witness is the dog. A tug on a trouser leg is enough to communicate what neither man on the call can see. Later Li Hao has to choose where to direct his eyes, knowing that an honest look could tell an observer too much. The opening leaves the investigation under way. It has already made something as slight as a glance a decision I care about, which is a very good reason to keep reading.
Read chapter 8 · Hear the telephone call outside the sealed house ↗Based on chapters 1–8 of the English edition. We read eight complete story chapters through catalogue entry 12, including both parts of chapters 3, 5, 7 and 8. This is an opening impression, not a full-series verdict. No later plot developments are discussed.
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