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| GHOST MUSIC, by An Yu | 《鬼乐》(Ghost Music)，作者：安於 |
| Not much is known about the inner life of mushrooms, but we can guess at the presence of a sort of subterranean sociality from the extensive networks of underground filaments that link individual organisms to a vast community of plants, tree roots and other fungi. Although the mushroom’s cap and stalk are its most obvious features, they are only the visible signs of a deeper life — the way that the tip of an iceberg hints at the bulk obscured below, the white and black keys of the piano represent the hidden strings full of unstructured, potential sound. Or the way that certain novels give the impression of being animated by a force that has little to do with their ordered combination of words. Instead these narratives seem to orbit their own expression: They exist beyond language, above it, or maybe even below it — who could say of something as elusive as story precisely how or where it eludes? | 我们对蘑菇的内在知之甚少，但是，从那些将单个有机体与植物、树根和其他真菌组成的庞大社区联系起来的广阔地下细丝网络中，我们可以猜测到一种地下社会性的存在。虽然蘑菇的菌盖和菌柄是它最明显的特征，但它们只是更深层生命的可见标志——就像露出水面的冰山一角暗示着下面被掩盖的大块一样，钢琴的黑白键代表着充满无序、潜在声音的隐藏琴弦。又或者说，某些小说给人的印象是被一种力量所驱动，而这种力量与它们有序的词语组合几乎没有关系。相反，这些叙述似乎围绕着它们自己的表达：它们存在于语言之外，高居语言之上，甚至可能位于语言之下——谁能准确地说出，像故事这样难以捉摸的东西，是如何抑或在何处隐藏？ |
| An Yu’s second novel, the spellbinding and atmospheric follow-up to her 2020 debut, “Braised Pork,” is a meditation on this dreamlike layer of existence. Song Yan, a young woman living in Beijing with her husband and mother-in-law, once trained to become a concert pianist but now spends her days giving piano lessons to neighborhood children. Bowen, her husband, is frequently away working for BMW, and when he’s at home his presence only emphasizes his remoteness, a quiet figure at the dinner table whose enigmatic behavior Song Yan continually works to decrypt. “I could tell that Bowen must have been bothered by something that had happened during the day — he did not speak much and he shook his head every once and again at nothing in particular,” she observes, shortly before he storms out of the room. | 安於的第二部小说是她2020年的处女作《红烧肉》(Braised Pork)的续篇，它引人入胜，充满氛围感，是对这种梦幻般的存在的思考。宋嫣（音）是一位年轻的女性，她和丈夫、婆婆住在北京。她曾经接受过钢琴训练，想成为一名职业钢琴家，但现在她每天都在给邻居的孩子上钢琴课。在宝马公司工作的丈夫博文（音）经常出差，而在家的时候，他的存在只会突显他的疏离——餐桌上一个安静的身影，宋嫣不断努力破译他神秘的行为。“我看得出博文一定是为白天的事情感到烦恼——他说话不多，而且时不时莫名其妙地摇头，”她观察到，随后他怒气冲冲地走出房间。 |
| Bowen’s recently widowed mother has just come from the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan to live with them, having left behind her hometown for this tense and lonesome urban setting where her only emotional connection is her inscrutable son. Though Song Yan wants a baby as much as her mother-in-law wants a grandchild, they seem unable to communicate about Bowen’s unwillingness to start a family, resulting in a deep despondency that the women experience in their own separate, encapsulated ways. What brings them together are the mysterious packages that keep arriving at their door, containing rare species of Yunnan mushrooms, which Song Yan and her mother-in-law cook together and serve to the inscrutable Bowen. | 博文的母亲刚刚丧夫，从中国西南部的云南省来到这个紧张而孤独的城市，在这里她唯一的情感纽带就是她那神秘的儿子。虽然宋嫣想生孩子，就像她的婆婆想要孙辈一样，但她们似乎无法就博文不愿意生育的问题进行沟通，导致两位女性以各自的方式感到深深沮丧。让她们走到一起的是不断送到家门口的神秘包裹，里面装着稀有的云南蘑菇，宋嫣和婆婆一起烹饪，端给神秘的博文。 |
| These deliveries are sent by someone calling himself Bai Yu, which Song Yan recognizes immediately as the name of a world-famous concert pianist who went missing years ago and has been presumed dead. When she accepts the sender’s invitation to visit at an address in Beijing, she finds the pianist waiting for her at his long-abandoned home. At his request she plays for him, trying to infuse the music with what he calls “the sound of being alive.” | 这些快递是由一个自称白羽（音）的人送来的，宋嫣马上就认出了这个名字，他是一位世界著名的职业钢琴家，几年前失踪，据推测已经死亡。当她接受寄件人的邀请去北京的一个地址拜访时，她发现这位钢琴家在废弃已久的家中等着她。在他的要求下，她为他演奏，试图将他所说的“活着的声音”注入音乐中。 |
| In the mysterious pianist Song Yan finds a mirror of her own withdrawal from musical performance, and from the relationships and mutual understandings that anchor a life. “The more time I spent with the piano,” Bai Yu confesses to her, “the more it seemed like my hands didn’t belong to me. The sounds didn’t come from me. I became frightened to the point that every time I was sitting at the piano, I couldn’t help but feel there wasn’t a ‘me’ at all. So I stopped playing.” As they begin to meet more regularly, their interactions seem to loosen the bindings of Song Yan’s life, dredging up secrets long submerged within her husband’s past. | 在这位神秘钢琴家身上，宋嫣看到了自己是在如何逃避音乐表演，逃避那些给生活提供了重心的关系和相互理解。“我在钢琴上花的时间越多，”白羽向她坦白道，“我的手就越不属于我。琴声并非出自我手。我开始害怕，以至于每次坐到钢琴前，我都不禁感觉‘我’其实根本不存在。于是我就不再弹了。”随着见面更加频繁，他们的互动似乎松开了宋嫣人生中的桎梏，挖掘出了隐藏在丈夫过去的秘密。 |
| With its quiet, dreamy bending of reality and its precise depiction of many different strains of alienation, “Ghost Music” is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully — and the potential consequences of failing to do so. Yu braids the mundane and the magical together with a gentle hand: Song Yan receives regular visitations from a giant, luminescent talking mushroom that insists, “Conceptually, I’m more similar to ghosts than mushrooms.” Meanwhile, a strange orange dust of unknown origin is settling over Yunnan, making it impossible to discern river from land. There’s something here of early Murakami’s graceful, open-ended approach to the uncanny, as well as the vivid yet muted emotionality of Patrick Modiano or Katie Kitamura. Like these skillful portraitists of alienation, Yu conjures a visceral in-betweenness where the worlds of matter and spirit meet in a shared, suspended space. | 通过对现实安静而梦幻的扭曲，以及对许多不同疏离感的精准描绘，《鬼乐》是对何谓充实生活——以及做不到这一点的潜在后果——的一次令人回味的探索。安於用温柔的手法将世俗与奇妙编织在一起：一个会发光会说话的巨型蘑菇经常拜访宋嫣，并坚称：“从概念上讲，比起蘑菇我更像鬼。”与此同时，一种来历不明的诡异橙色尘埃正在笼罩云南上空，以至于分不清河流和陆地。这部作品带有一些早期村上春树描写光怪陆离之事的优雅和悬疑，也带有帕特里克·莫迪亚诺或凯蒂·北村笔下那种生动而含蓄的情感。和这些描写疏离感十分熟稔的作家一样，安於召唤出一种内在游离状态，让物质和精神世界在这个共通的悬浮空间中相遇。 |
| “Ghost Music” inverts the tropes of the ghost story, which often feature spirits acting out in the violent, passionate way of the living — hurling objects from tabletops, demanding recognition and restitution — instead drawing the familiar world of human life closer to the enigmatic realm of the dead. Song Yan, Bowen and his mother go through the daily choreographies of their lives and occupations without complaint, haunting well-worn routines in the same way a spirit might haunt a former home. | 鬼故事中的魂灵往往以暴力而炽烈的方式行事，包括扔桌面上的东西，要求得到承认和偿还，但《鬼乐》颠覆了这样的叙事，选择将人类生活的熟悉世界与神秘的死亡界域拉近。宋嫣、博文和他的母亲日复一日毫无怨言地忍受着生活和工作的琐事，像鬼出没于生前居所一样，被困于陈旧的日常。 |
| Unable to fully accept or reject their circumstances, unable to let go of old attachments or hold tightly enough to them to remain grounded, the living characters who populate the novel seem more adrift than the ghosts. In one early encounter, the eerie mushroom-like entity asks Song Yan for help. “It is normal that you don’t understand,” it tells her. “But when you leave this room … I’d like you to remember me.” What comes to feel most mournful about Yu’s human characters is their inability to express their desires, to translate their intense longing into a simple request. | 无法彻底接受或拒绝自身境遇，放不下也抓不住旧日依恋，脚落不下实地，这本小说里的活人似乎比鬼更加飘忽不定。在早期的一次相遇中，诡异的蘑菇状物体向宋嫣求助。“你不明白，这很正常，”它告诉她。“但当你离开这个房间……我希望你记得我。”最令人感到悲哀的是，安於笔下的人类角色无法表达自己的欲望，也无法将他们最强烈的渴望转化为一句简单的请求。 |
| Alexandra Kleeman is the author, most recently, of “Something New Under the Sun.” | 《鬼乐》｜作者：安於｜226页｜Grove出版社｜26美元 |
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