You can read this as a Buddhist-inspired meditation on permanence/ephemerality, perfection/blemish, order/chaos, etc/etc — or as a Beckettian (Watt and the short plays especially) riff on obsessive mental tics, ghostliness, and the irreality of innerspace. I guess it's both, and both of those things partake of the other. All I know is it's weird as fuck and I like it.

I'll shortly be cracking open the Tale of Genji for book club, so I was mildly stunned to realise that Krasznahorkai's (gesundheit) novella is about the apparently immortal or atemporal "grandson of Prince Genji" wandering a semi-real abandoned monastery in a semi-real Kyoto in search of a secret, perfect garden. It's the missing 100th garden in a lost book of perfect gardens, and this book consists of 50 chapters, with the first one missing.