The Message

The Message is the concluding work of Mai Jia's "Decryption Trilogy," and the story begins by West Lake in Hangzhou in the spring and summer of 1941. A leaked coded telegram from the Japanese-puppet regime exposes an undercover Chinese Communist agent within its ranks, codenamed "Old Ghost." To root out this person as quickly as possible, Japanese secret service chief Ryukawa Hihara and the Wang Jingwei regime's side imprison five suspected military VIPs in the Chateau, once a site of song and dance, screening, interrogating, and testing them one by one. Yet "Old Ghost" faces far more than exposure: the intelligence that hangs on comrades' lives must be sent out, and the Chateau is heavily guarded—any whisper could be a death knell. In the enclosed space of captivity, several people mirror one another through words, lies, memories, and tiny gestures; every conversation is a clash on a blade's edge. The novel does not pursue a single-line mystery of "who is Old Ghost"; instead, through the multiple perspectives of Part One, "East Wind," Part Two, "West Wind," and the outer "Still Wind," it repeatedly retells the same events, so that each prior layer is overturned, rewritten, and patched, the truth retreating layer by layer among contradictory testimonies before finally approaching a heavier answer. With precise logical structure, restrained language, and the extreme situation of "a locked room and the trap of captivity," Mai Jia turns an intellectual contest into an interrogation of faith and the boundaries of human nature. This is the 2020 fully revised edition from Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, including the author's extensive revisions, an essay on the writing, and original illustrations.