Ningjing Xia

On the way to Mount Tai, Celeste encounters a mysterious, sharp-tongued teenage girl on a bus, who claims to converse with a man named Illus—a soul she met after a suicide attempt led to her being taken to a psychiatric hospital. Through her vivid, winding storytelling, she recounts Illus’s adolescence in a coastal village, his meeting with a Shanghai classmate Toma. In order to take samples of seawater, Illus secretly untied the old fishing boat passed down from his family and took Toma to the deep sea.