The Scent Weaver's Chronicle of a Floating World

Noble Fragrance of a Floating World is a tale of the strange and supernatural, serialized by its author, Six Desires of a Floating Buddha, on the Tianya community forum and later published by Yunnan People's Publishing House in 2012. Its subtitle reads "A Chronicle of Worldly Affairs from Times Past." The story unfolds in Guichuan, a small town in the heart of the Chinese heartland: a place of convenient transport and rich waters, where the ties of everyday life weave a fine, close mesh. On the surface all is calm, yet in the shadows lie countless secrets that defy explanation. One day a beautiful single woman named Yingxiang, skilled in the art of incense-making, arrives in town. A lone woman in a small town where gossip is a fearsome thing, she is all but worn to death by prying eyes and scheming calculations—until a handsome, composed "husband," Long Shuo, suddenly appears. He seems to know everyone's secrets and to see through the hidden causes behind every human entanglement. And so, through wreathing incense smoke and Long Shuo's discerning gaze, the stories of the town's assorted inhabitants unfold one after another: an incense-maker with a mysterious past, a mountain spirit escaped from its seal, an upright and keen-eyed constable, a master thief with ulterior motives, a spoiled maidservant, a down-and-out scholar, a clever cook. With Guichuan as its stage, the book joins story after interconnected story of worldly affairs into a single long scroll, using tales of ghosts and monsters to probe the subtleties of the human heart—for the most terrifying thing is often not the monster, but that unnameable selfishness lurking within the ways of the world.