The novel opens during the first year of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Stephen Chan, a thin, wavy-haired 20-year-old Chinese student and oil painter, introduces his method of storytelling: a newly purchased book of Japanese parchment paper in which he will record his journey of recovery from an unknown illness. Stephen contracts this illness in the spring, while studying at Lingan University in Canton. After two weeks of argument, Stephen has convinced his stubborn, short, bespectacled and tightly-suited import-export businessman father, “Ba-Ba,” to allow him to travel alone from the apartment his father keeps in Kobe, Japan to his grandfather’s beach house in the village of Tarumi.

Stephen notes that his father, with homes in both China and Japan, “makes his life in both places and the way he bows low with eyes averted seems at times more Japanese than Chinese to me” (4). This sense of duality continues in the Western names Stephen’s father has given to all of the children – Stephen; Penelope (“Pie,” twelve years old); Anne (the elder sister); and Henry (the younger brother). Stephen’s father is affectionate and overprotective; he sees Stephen’s painting as a time-wasting hobby.

Before his trip to Tarumi, Stephen recounts the story of his illness so far.