One dark, rainy night, Yu Ching-Yang gets a knock on his door. It’s the police, claiming they may have found his father’s body. But that can’t be right – Yu Ching-Yang’s father, Yu Kuei, was cremated and buried years ago after being crushed by a train. No, the police reply, we found his remains on a mountainside, complete with his heirloom watch. Moreover, the body crushed under the subway had had a bullet hole in the forehead.
How could this have happened? Amidst the trauma of this new discovery, Yu Ching-Yang does his best to help the police by looking back through his mother and father’s early history. But some of what he finds does not want to be uncovered – secrets of the Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, dark connections to Wang Jing-Wei and the Japanese puppet government in Shanghai, eerie coincidences that somehow brought the young man and young woman together. But, as Yu Ching-Yang has found out, bodies never stay buried…