The scene is set at the height of World War II and Japan rules over China. In the beautiful city of Hangzhou, a puppet government propped up by the Japanese is waging an underground war against the Chinese resistance movement.
The story starts late one night in 1941 when three men and two women are escorted to an isolated mansion outside the city. These five individuals are intelligence officers and they are employed as codebreakers by the regime.
They are informed of communist activity in the area and given an intercepted message from Commander Zhang Yiting to decode.
The secret police, however, suspect that one of the five codebreakers is a spy for the resistance and decide to conduct an investigation. The five - chief of staff Wu Zhiguo, section chief Jin Shenghuo, cryptographer Li Ningyu, secretary Bai Xiaonian and Gu Xiaomeng, a subordinate of Li - are told not to leave the mansion until the traitor, code-named “Ghost” is uncovered.
Hence begins the cat-and-mouse game of trying to uncover and confirm the identity of Ghost. Although it may appear to be a straightforward case of separating truth from lies, unfortunately for both Commander Zhang and his superior, Colonel Hihara Ryusen - a trusted agent of General Matsui Iwane, the Commander-in-Chief of Japan’s invading Shanghai Expeditionary Army - things do not work out that way.
Hihara, who is also the head of Matsui’s secret police in charge of counter-espionage across Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces, decides to conduct the interrogations of the five himself.
But to his dismay, each codebreaker spins a different story to prove their innocence. And as events are framed and re-framed, what actually happened is called into question repeatedly.
The Message uses its wartime setting as a clever disguise for its storyline. A historical thriller camouflaged in meta-fiction, the reader is constantly being teased with fragments of a tale while being made aware that it is not the whole story. A clever way indeed to tell a story with hidden meaning by the author.