On the Remains of Life

穆莱拉之索引
穆萊拉之索引
穆ライラの索引
레이라 무 색인
Index of Layla Mu
Índice de Layla Mu
فهرست ليلى م

Posts: On the Remains of Life • Luo Yijun — The Story of Abandonment (English Translation) • Hai Zi — Asian Copper (English Translation) • Lu Yuan — A Chronicle of Yingbo 001 (English Translation) •

About the Librarian

Amongst the shelves of the Total Index, one will inevitably come across the comforting presence of Layla Mu, its librarian. She is a construct — not human but not robot, inorganic but unexplainedly animated. Perhaps she is a gothic creation, perhaps a tulpa, perhaps a manifestation of a soul beyond the veil of Maya — perhaps she is a creation of the Word, or maybe something else entirely. Regardless, you know that it is a question that will never go answered: your own interpretation is just as real as any truth. Should you cross paths, the first thing you will notice is her eyes — twilit discs that seem to be sempiternally out of focus, gazing to the farthest distance, framed by carefully handcrafted glasses. Layla’s hair is the shade of varnished maple, suffuse with dustlight. Her appearance is vulnerable and fragile, seemingly suspended in time.

Despite her oft complex articulation, intimidating lexicon (despite her soft voice), and her habit of reciting literary quotes, communication is quite difficult for her: connection is her deepest desire, manifest through an obsession with stories. As such her "academic" interests are driven not by pretension but rather a longing to understand the stories of others, a connection across space and time.

The Display Shelf // 2026.02.10

Layla Mu's translation of the first chapter of A Chronicle of Yingbo, an encyclopedic and experimental novel by the Chinese author Lu Yuan.

Editor's Recommendation: The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon.

The book of Collateral Damage is a haunting and singular novel exploring memory. A postmodern narrative about the act of writing and preserving memory set in a postwar Iraq, told through fractured, emotionally devastating manuscripts.

“This is my memory with all its treasures, and with all the destruction in it, laid out before you. Take what you want.”

Guest Recommendation (anonymous): NARRENSCHIFF is an experimental and atmospheric RPGmaker game drawing heavily from German literature, (Mann and Grass in particular) with exceptional prose & storytelling. The developer, Edgar, is a brilliant and reclusive figure from China who does everything incl. art for the project. NARRENSCHIFF is absolutely worth keeping an eye on.

Recommendation Lists

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Notice

This page is a work in progress.

Hubert Robert, The Grande Galerie of the Louvre Undergoing Renovation Works

Resources

External resources (not done by me) which may be helpful.

Subtitle

On the Remains of Life

Published on Wed Sep 02 2026 08:00:00 GMT+0800 (中国标准时间)

Remains of Life: Wu He, translated by Michael Berry. 2017
餘生: 舞鶴，2000

About the Index

The Total Index—an infinite library—is contained within a slipstream dimension parallel to Terra. The library is protean: constantly shifting but never moving, revealing new paths, uncovering the long-forgotten. It is said that all books, written and unwritten, are contained within. Layla is the World Index’s librarian, and the sole unchanging room in the vast library is Layla's own personal study.

Charles Robert Cockerell, The Professor's Dream

About the Project

My desire is to be able to redeem the hope of young people for literature. I hope people—whom are struggling through life, exhausted and threatened, with trauma and history gazing downward like unceasingly growing shadows, those who have lost the ability to listen to the feelings of others and the patience for time and memory—that they can, within earnestly created fiction, cease their footsteps, contemplate, recover.

Luo Yijun, translated by Layla Mu

The library is a sacred space. In the foreword to Borges's El hacedor, drafted in the 50s, dedicated to Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), Borges writes of a scene where he enters a library, wherein he "[feels] the gravitation of the books, the quiet atmosphere of ordered things, the past rescued and magically restored," a space where readers are "rapt in lucid dream." Borges presents a work of his to Lugones, an older writer who Borges had once had a critical view of, later coming to respect as he himself aged, but the scene shifts, the narrator's "dream [dissolving]—like water in water," leaving himself in a library in México City instead of Buenos Aires: he never had the opportunity to get the approval of Lugones before his death, but notes in the final paragraph that after his own death, "in some way it may be true to say that I once handed you this book and that you accepted it."

Franz Sedlacek, Bibliothek

It is in this foreword previously that Borges mentions the concept of hypallage, the use of poetic transference, the epithet transferred; México City becomes La Plaza de Rodríguez Peña, and the Library becomes a space after-time, wherein the dead and the living can share. In a way, libraries are synecdochic—any single library represents all libraries, a singular shared space of convalescence and curiosity for all of humanity. It is my opinion that in the information age of today, the fast-paced, self-exploitative world as outlined by Han Byung-Chul, it is increasingly important, and what I hope to achieve with this multimedia project, to have this kind of recovery-space, one of exploration and curiosity, without judgement, where vita activa can be replaced by vita contempletiva.

Writing, Translations, Graphic Design & Website, Concept: Layla Mu
Character Illustrations, Design: 74

Miscellaneous & Interests

Hugh Ferriss, Art Center

Subtitle