Delicate cherry tree

“Tonkaya Ryabina,” or “The Slender Hawthorn,” is more than a song recalled in passing: it is a portable fragment of Luo Ji’s private emotional life. First associated with an unhurried journey through the countryside and with Zhuang Yan, it later returns during Luo Ji’s lonely flight through a hostile future society. Its recurrence turns the song into a measure of what has survived across centuries—and of how completely Luo Ji has been separated from the ordinary human intimacy that once gave it meaning.

The Song in the Countryside

During the journey, Luo Ji and Zhuang Yan move without a fixed destination, stopping at fields, a nearly dry northern river, a market, a newly built village, and a town where they rest in the sun. The landscape repeatedly refuses idealization. The village has broad cement roads, new houses, parked cars, city-style clothing, and even the same long-haired, short-legged dogs found in urban neighborhoods. Yet the journey gradually reaches the rural world they had imagined: cave houses, persimmon and walnut trees, low stone-tiled buildings, roofs stacked with stripped corn cobs, and larger, fiercer dogs.

At the entrance to one village, they find an unexpectedly immense stage standing empty. Luo Ji climbs onto it and, looking down at Zhuang Yan as his sole audience member, sings a verse from “Tonkaya Ryabina” about the slender hawthorn tree. The performance is small and improvised, but the stage gives it an almost ceremonial setting. A public structure designed for a crowd becomes the site of a private exchange between two people, while the song gives their wandering a shared emotional form.

The surrounding journey is marked by small acts of attention rather than grand declarations. Luo Ji stops the car so that he and Zhuang Yan can watch magpies forage before flying into distant trees. They break thin ice over the river and throw smooth stones into the cloudy yellow water, watching it gush through the holes. At the market, Zhuang Yan kneels beside a goldfish vendor and refuses to leave; Luo Ji buys her two fish and places them, with their water, in plastic bags on the backseat. Against these concrete details, the song functions as a refrain for a relationship expressed through movement, observation, play, and care.

Return Across Centuries

Much later, “Tonkaya Ryabina” resurfaces when Luo Ji is traveling toward the old city. He has left his neighborhood on foot in the rain, avoided using his own car so as not to attract the guards’ attention, crossed the protective forest belt, and entered the desert. The dusk is hazy, and he imagines himself as part of the blank space of the landscape, like the painting Zhuang Yan left behind. The song therefore returns at a moment when absence is not merely remembered but physically inhabited.

A family of three picks him up on the highway. They are hibernators returning to the old city, and Luo Ji watches the child burrow into the mother’s bosom while all three laugh together. Old twentieth-century songs play in the car, including “Katyusha” and “Kalinka.” After hearing several of them, Luo Ji becomes intensely aware of his desire to hear “Tonkaya Ryabina.” He remembers singing it to an imaginary lover on the village stage two centuries earlier and later singing it with Zhuang Yan in the Garden of Eden beside the lake reflecting snowy peaks.

The recollection gathers several layers of his past into one musical desire. The song belongs first to the imaginary lover he once staged for himself, then to the real intimacy of Zhuang Yan, and finally to the isolated consciousness of a man who has outlived the world in which those moments occurred. Its power comes from this overlap: the melody is both personal memory and historical continuity, carrying an earlier emotional life into a radically altered age.

Recognition and Rejection

The song begins playing just as the child turns to look at Luo Ji. The child recognizes him as the Wallfacer, and Luo Ji admits that the resemblance is real. The family’s response changes immediately. The car stops, and the father coldly orders Luo Ji to get out while the mother and child watch him with the chill of the autumn rain outside.

Luo Ji does not move at first because he wants to keep listening. That hesitation makes the song briefly more important than the practical danger of the journey. He is not resisting the family so much as trying to hold on to a sound that connects him to Zhuang Yan, to the village stage, and to a version of himself that existed before the public burden attached to his name.

The family’s hostility is presented through what Luo Ji reads in their eyes: they do not blame him simply for failing to save the world; they condemn him for giving the world hope and then shattering it again. The song consequently becomes caught between private consolation and collective accusation. Its appearance does not restore the past. Instead, it coincides with Luo Ji’s expulsion from the car and exposes the distance between the tenderness he remembers and the unforgiving judgment attached to his public identity.

The Refrain’s Significance

After Luo Ji is forced out, his travel bag is thrown after him. He runs after the departing car for a few steps, hoping to hear a little more of “Tonkaya Ryabina,” but the song vanishes into the cold, rainy night. The physical action is modest and revealing: he pursues not the family, not transportation, and not an argument, but the fading remainder of the music. The lost sound becomes an audible form of the life he can no longer reenter.

The expression’s significance lies in its recurrence and contrast. In the countryside, Luo Ji sings the song from a stage to Zhuang Yan amid a day of shared discovery; centuries later, he longs to hear it in a car occupied by a family whose laughter evokes the domestic warmth he is watching from the outside. The same song first accompanies chosen intimacy and later accompanies recognition, fear, rejection, and exile.

As a literary refrain, “Tonkaya Ryabina” also binds together the novel’s enormous historical scale and its smallest human gestures. It survives technological change, hibernation, political transformation, and the passage of two centuries, yet its meaning remains dependent on fragile scenes: a lone listener below a village stage, a lake reflecting snowy peaks, a remembered voice, and a song cut short by strangers. Its final disappearance does not erase the memory. It shows instead that memory may endure even when the social world refuses to make room for the person who carries it.