Ghost Music

Ghost Music is a novel by the Chinese writer An Yu, published in 2022. It followed her first novel, Braised Pork.

Song Yan used to perform, and now she teaches piano in the flat she shares with her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, and she has been asking him for a child for years without getting a straight answer. His mother comes up from Yunnan and starts her own campaign on the same subject, which turns a marriage that had been quiet into something strained, and parcels of mushrooms from the province arrive with no explanation. Song Yan is also dreaming about a room with no door that she cannot get out of, furnished with a single orange mushroom, and the dreams and the parcels begin to point at a musician who has disappeared. An Yu keeps the ordinary life of the city in view, and the supernatural element is delivered as something that may be a symptom of what Song Yan is refusing to admit.

The novel was published first in Britain and then in the United States, and it is one of a number of books in recent years in which Chinese domestic life is written about in the register of the ghost story.