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A first-person narrative about a thirty-two year old man named Aaron who begins to suffer schizophrenia. In Asia, ostensibly to become a professor and find a nice Asian wife, Aaron begins having auditory and visual hallucinations, delusional thought processes, and paranoia. Unable to discern between his own subjective experiences and the outside world, he becomes entrapped in a world where three characters—a young Japanese man named Suga, Albert Einstein, and David Hume, the skeptic philosopher—appear to converse with him. Everyone else he encounters shuns or flees from him, however. Making his way back to the United States and concerned parents, a whirlwind of mental degeneration sets in, with a mysterious "psychological team" assuming overarching presence in his mind as a sinister force controlling him. This, together with an idée fixe that an electronic device has been implanted in his left ear, leaves him at the mercy of voices and commands that he is unable to resist.
Told in a series of thirty-eight short chapters, the author has charted a journey of untold mental suffering. A window into the inner world of one suffering from mental illness, the endless cycle of psychosis, hospitalization, medication, and relapse is described in painful detail. Dramatic interest is kept up by the intriguing discussions about perception, reason, and truth he has with Albert Einstein and David Hume, who seem to show up to discuss the problem of reality in the most strange situations. Matter-of-fact descriptions of his interactions with friends, women, policemen, and doctors shed light onto the stigma and shame of schizophrenia. A person of obvious intelligence, the author has managed to map his tortuous journey in starkly honest terms. This book is a testament to the will to survive—and also a riveting read. The language is simple and straightforward. The theme is human suffering, thereby approaching a universality, though its subject matter is indeed unique.