Ghost Wife

Ghost Wife is a full-length romance novel by Taiwanese romance author Lei Enna, first published in February 2002 by Taiwan's Homer Culture and introduced to mainland China in January 2003 by Qinghai People's Publishing House under its "Flower Season Novels" series. The heroine is a woman who died young and lingers by the riverbank; worldly and full of feeling, she has grown used to the boundless desolation of a hundred years of solitude. By a stroke of chance she falls in love with a man of blank expression and cold demeanor, and is determined to place herself in his calm life, even at the cost of revealing her true identity and willingly becoming his "ghost wife." Yet her initiative meets a painful answer: he is an envoy of the underworld, the Literary Judge who keeps the Register of Life and Death, and having attained immortal fruition, he cannot be entangled in mortal love between man and woman. The gulf between them is like that between cloud and mud, and they seem fated to be connected yet never united. She asks only to confirm that he is not indifferent, and with that she is content, finally letting reincarnation close the curtain on a love that crosses the boundary of life and death and can never be resolved. The whole work takes the separation of the human and ghost realms as its premise, unfolding a deep affection that persists despite knowing it cannot be, in a delicate, gentle style bearing the lyricism and melancholy peculiar to early Taiwanese romance.