A fantasy novel in which Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, meets a Black enslaved man named Friday at a sideshow and follows the traces of a Crusoe who may truly have existed. Across its two-part structure, stories of an island and the histories of its people intertwine between fact and fiction.

Did Robinson Crusoe truly exist?

In a strange town where composing exceptional songs is the highest honor and the magic within songs is feared, Aonekoya makes dolls while secretly practicing iyainuki, the removal of songs with occult power. The shop becomes entangled in an incident involving a song that vanished forty-eight years earlier.

Aonekoya, a shop of dollmaking and song-removal, pursues the mystery of a vanished song.