A ghost story, a baseball epic, a colonial history—and an unforgettable friendship that spans a century

In 2028, sixteen-year-old Chi-lang, an Amis indigenous baseball player from Taiwan studying at an elite school in Kyoto, discovers a memorial stone inscribed in Amis in a Buddhist temple garden. By reading the inscription aloud—Come home, Kilang—he summons back the ghost of a young man who died a hundred years earlier and shares his name. Kilang remembers only one thing: that someone once promised to lead his soul home, and never did.

The novel travels back to 1920s colonial Hualien, where two inseparable Amis teenagers—Tree and Banana Leaf—labour as “coolies” for a Japanese conglomerate before being recruited onto a pioneering baseball team. Their talent carries them from Taiwan to Tokyo and Kyoto, but the world they inhabited was never built for them. Dying far from home of pneumonia, Tree extracts a solemn vow from his friend, rooted in Amis tradition: whoever survives will lead the other’s soul back to Fatā’an.

Weaving between the present and the past, the novel follows Chi-lang as he pieces together what happened—to Tree, to Banana Leaf, and to Sasa, the woman who loved them both—and asks what it means to keep a promisewhen history itself stands in the way.