Four Narratives and a Funeral

«Meihua. Triptych 2.0» as a Grand Game with the Myths of Borges… In this labyrinthine novel, the eternal archetypes of narrative become not merely the plot, but the world’s operating system — one that is destined for a fatal error in the finale.

Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that in the entire history of humanity, only four stories have ever been told: the siege of a city, the return, the search, and the suicide of a god. «Meihua. Triptych 2.0» is a bold and, without exaggeration, grand-scale literary project that takes this concise formula and transforms it into its very architecture. It is a book that explores these narratives not as literary devices, but as the fundamental laws of being, as the lines of code upon which reality itself is written.

The author does not simply use Borges’s archetypes — he builds from them a complex, polyphonic structure where each story contains all four elements, creating a dizzying system of mirrors and reflections worthy of the Argentine master himself.

The first part of the cycle — a triptych of micro-novels titled «A Road of a Thousand Years», «The Paths», and «The River» — masterfully plays out the first three archetypes. We witness the Siege in all its bloody literality in the hell of the Nanking Massacre («The River») and in the metaphorical struggle of the individual against a merciless system in Maoist China («The Road»). We observe tragic attempts at a Return — Colonel Morozov to the ghost of his love, the soldier Ichiro to the scene of his crime — which invariably culminate in the realization of irreversible loss. And we follow the characters of «The Paths» on their detective-like Search for truth, which, as befits a true tragedy, leads not to discovery, but to destruction. At this stage, it seems we are reading a masterfully executed, yet classic saga of 20th-century trauma.

But this is merely a prelude. In the second triptych, the author casts off the mask of realism and plunges the reader into a metaphysical abyss where Borges’s most complex and mysterious plot takes the stage: the Suicide of a god. Through the biting satire of «The Battle of Bun’ei», where the siege-story devolves into farce, and the existential horror of «The Observer Effect», where reality itself «besieges» itself with entropy, we approach the finale: the novella «Code(a)».

It is here that the author’s design is revealed in its full, staggering scale. The «God» of this universe turns out to be not a higher power, but its creator in the most literal sense — the author, a Soviet engineer who wrote «Meihua. Triptych» as part of a secret experimental project, turning it into a «backup copy» of the world. And the act of «suicide» is committed by his own creation. The brilliant hacker Ayame — a character born within the pages of this book — finds its source code. In an act of ultimate professional hubris, striving for «optimization», she deletes the «unnecessary» text file — the very narrative we have just read.

This is the «suicide of a god» — elegant, digital, and executed from within. A character erases the sacred text of her creator, and the world, stripped of its foundation, begins to collapse. The program created for salvation becomes a machine of annihilation.

«Meihua. Triptych 2.0» is a work of rare intellectual honesty and structural complexity. The author doesn’t just play with genres; he uses them as lenses to examine the same crystal of reality. This is a novel that returns to literature its original, demiurgic function. It reminds us that every story is an act of creation, and every reader is an observer whose attention prevents the world from, as William Blake wrote, «sinking into greyness».

In the finale, as the heroine stands before the empty Book, deciding whether to become its new author, the story does not end. The author passes the baton to us. This is a profoundly Borgesian gesture: at the end of the labyrinth, we find not an exit, but a mirror, reflecting an infinity of new stories awaiting their teller.

If one were to look for flaws, they would prove to be extensions of its virtues. The structural complexity may deter readers seeking simple stories. The philosophical density demands intellectual effort. But that is like reproaching a labyrinth for being easy to get lost in. The wandering itself is the point.

«Meihua. Triptych 2.0» is a rare case where a contemporary author enters into a dialogue with a classic master not as an epigone, but as an equal. It is a work that is simultaneously an homage to Borges and a wholly original creation, enriching the tradition with new meaning.

Four eternal narratives, refracted through the prism of Eastern philosophy and digital modernity, create a work that becomes a fifth archetype itself: the story of how stories create and destroy worlds.

The ending, where Padma extends her hand to Ayu, inviting her to become a co-creator of a new reality, is an invitation to the reader as well. We have journeyed through all four narratives: we witnessed the siege of our accustomed reality, we attempted to return to the book’s beginning with new understanding, we searched for hidden meanings, and finally, we witnessed the death of the old world of the text and the birth of a new one—in our own minds…

Or is this, perhaps, the sixth story?