The Writing of the Gods

The Writing of the Gods is the sole book attributed to Klaus Johannes and an object at the boundary between documented publication and unresolved absence. For Rong Jinzhen, it embodies the possibility of reaching the deepest secrets of cryptography; yet the more completely he mobilizes people to find it, the more the failure to locate a copy unsettles the distinction between a missing object and one that may not be there at all.

Authorship and Publication

A note identifies The Writing of the Gods as a book Klaus Johannes wrote during his lifetime. It was published by Chunghwa Book Company in 1945, and its translation was given the title The Riddle. The note establishes the work’s authorship and publication, even as the narrative leaves the whereabouts of any copy uncertain.

That distinction matters. The novel does not present Rong Jinzhen’s inability to find the book as proof that Klaus Johannes never wrote it: the publication information says otherwise. Instead, the gap lies between a recorded work and an object that cannot be recovered. Someone reportedly claimed to have seen it in a bookshop, but the sighting provides no usable lead, and no copy comes within reach of Rong Jinzhen or his searchers.

The Book as a Dreamed Challenge

The book first takes on its greatest intellectual significance in a dream within a dream. There, an imaginary Klaus Johannes rebukes Rong Jinzhen for becoming part of the system and for spending his abilities on mid- and low-level ciphers that others could solve. In the dream’s account, those errors have carried him farther from Klaus Johannes rather than closer. The imagined figure then offers a different task: decipher his book, described as the summit of high-level cryptography.

The dream assigns the book an extraordinary promise. Whoever could understand it, the imaginary Klaus Johannes says, would within thirty years be able to decipher the world’s most sophisticated ciphers. The challenge is not merely to break one code but to acquire a general understanding powerful enough to reach secrets at both the highest and lowest levels. The imagined author even turns a raised thumb into a sign of recognition if Rong Jinzhen succeeds. Rong Jinzhen treats this dream encounter as good news, though its promise belongs to the dream rather than to a verified account of the published book’s contents.

The imagined exchange also exposes the distance between Rong Jinzhen’s actual work and his ideal of cryptographic mastery. He answers that the adversary is no longer using a new high-level cipher, and asks what work would remain if he stopped deciphering the ciphers available to him. The dream book offers a way out of that narrowing routine: instead of solving another cipher, he could confront a work imagined as the key to understanding the whole field.

The Search and Its Failure

The dream’s challenge gives way to a waking investigation, but not to discovery. Rong Jinzhen’s people search extensively for the book; the account stresses that they can locate anything unless there is nothing there to locate. That stark conclusion does not cancel the publication record. It sharpens the puzzle: a book said to have been published in 1945, and reportedly seen in a bookshop, remains unavailable to a search powerful enough to find everything else.

The failed search is also personal. The accompanying note makes clear that Rong Jinzhen is angry that the secret services have been unable to find it. The frustration is more than inconvenience: the work has become the object of a specific intellectual demand raised by the dream, and its absence blocks the test the dream proposed. Yet the book is not shown to be a cipher, nor does the evidence establish that deciphering its actual contents would deliver the promised command of cryptography. That promise belongs to the imagined Klaus Johannes and remains untested.

Significance

The Writing of the Gods brings together two forms of uncertainty: the practical uncertainty of a search that yields no book, and the intellectual uncertainty of what the book might contain. Its historical trace is precise—author, publisher, year, and translated title—while its place in Rong Jinzhen’s life is shaped by a dream and a failed effort to recover it. The resulting tension makes the title both more concrete and more elusive: it is not simply a text he longs to read, but an absent object onto which the dream projects an answer to the limits of his work.

That projection resonates with the novel’s broader account of cryptography. Rong Jinzhen has been warned that entering the field’s history can mean taking a dangerous path through its old traps, even if the knowledge gained might narrow the search for a solution. The dream book appears to offer a concentrated route through that difficulty, but its absence prevents the offer from becoming a method. The search therefore ends not with mastery or disproof, but with the unresolved divide between a work recorded as published and a work that cannot be found.