Author: An Yu

Reading “Ghost Music” by An Yu was like being in a fever dream because of the introspective and dreamlike telling of the story.

We follow Song Yan, a gifted pianist living in Beijing who abandoned her concert career to become a wife. Her days are shaped by absence as her husband becomes increasingly distant, often away for work, and unmoved by her desire to have a child.

What might have been a stable life reveals itself as something far more precarious, built on compromises that now feel irreversible to her.

Song moves through her marriage and her city with a growing sense of dislocation, aware that whatever choices she makes next will leave a permanent mark.

The story takes a turn into the surreal when she begins to dream repeatedly of a doorless room inhabited by a talking mushroom. These dreams are never fully explained, and that might be the point.

Like much of the book, they function as emotional shorthand, giving form to feelings of entrapment, grief and unspoken longing. The mushroom lingers over the story like a reminder of what has been suppressed rather than resolved.

At one point, in a line that crystallizes the novels emotional core, she reflects that “loss came in all shapes and forms, but it never occurred to me until now that you could lose the things you never had.”

Written with spare yet evocative prose, “Ghost Music” carries themes of grief, identity crisis, the expectations one has for oneself, as well as familial expectations and bonds, loneliness and isolation.

Readers familiar with Yu’s earlier novel, “Braised Pork,” will recognize her fascination with complex women whose inner creative lives exist in tension with social and familial demands. In “Ghost Music,” that tension is rendered with clarity and eerie gloom.

I would love to read the novel again, especially because the writing was beautiful and I often found myself taking pause to study the author’s creative techniques.