Shoko brings the wedding dress her mother left her and enters a church with U, a lover she has known for only three months, to hold their wedding. Before the ceremony begins, U realizes he has left the wedding ring at home and rushes back to fetch it. Waiting alone in the church, Shoko instead receives the terrible news that U has been in a car accident. On her way to the hospital she is abducted by persons unknown, assaulted, and then vanishes without a trace. When U returns to the church, what waits for him is not his bride but two strangers who both claim to be Shoko's fiancés. Why would a gentle, quiet woman pledge marriage to three men at once? And what old story lies hidden in the wedding dress inherited from her mother? The novel advances along two alternating threads: one unfolds from Shoko's perspective, the other follows U as he searches for his missing bride; the two lines gradually converge before the reader's eyes, even as they continually take each other apart. As Kenji Kuroda's debut work, which won the 16th Mephisto Prize, the book invests heavily in locked-space, mistaken-identity, and time-gap tricks, grafting a pure-love narrative onto a cold, sinister design—only at the very end does the reader understand the true weight of the white wedding dress in the title.
Hunan People's Publishing House is a publisher known for its strengths in the humanities and social sciences and in translated classic works. Its catalog covers biography, Eastern philosophy, philosophical reading, social fiction, classics, and essays, with a particular focus on introducing major foreign works of thought and literary classics. Representative titles include Stefan Zweig's Decisive Moments in History and The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness, and Seneca's On the Shortness of Life, alongside multiple volumes of selected fiction by Shen Congwen. Among the translators and authors represented are Liang Xijiang, Yuan Xiaoyi, Yi Siting, Pan Lu, and Ren Guoqiang. Beyond the 142 titles in this catalog, public information is limited, so no further publishing details are given here.
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
