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THE LAKE OF TEARS

By Veeraporn Nitiprapha

Translated by Lucy

Srisuphapreeda

Cover and Interior Illustrations by

Nakrob Moonmanas

First published and distributed in 2026 by River Books Press Co., Ltd

396/1 Maharaj Road, Phraborommaharajawang, Bangkok 10200 Thailand

Tel: (66) 2 225-0139, 2 225-9574

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Publisher: River Books Press Ltd., Bangkok, Thailand

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe Oü, 16879218 - Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, gpsr.requests@easproject.com

Editor: Narisa Chakrabongse

Production supervision: Ruetairat Nanta

Design: Ruetairat Nanta

Cover and Interior Illustrations: Nakrob Moonmanas

ISBN 978 616 451 111 8

Printed and bound in Thailand by Amarin corporations public Co., Ltd

To the children of Siam

Translator’s Note

Waking up feels like plunging, tumbling, or falling, but not downwards. It’s more like rising upwards from the black depths of sleep into a world of murky blue.

The opening lines of The Lake of Tears demand the reader’s attention immediately. The paradoxical sensation of falling upwards just before waking is universally familiar yet elusive, and in this coming-of-age novel, Veeraporn Nitiprapha gives words to that feeling and to the emotional journey of growing up in the shadow of loss.

The Lake of Tears is Veeraporn’s third novel, following The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth and Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat, both recipients of the prestigious Southeast Asian Writers Award. Unlike those novels, it is her first foray into fiction for young people, yet rather than a departure from her signature style, it feels like a refinement, exploring familiar themes of longing, memory, abandonment, and love through a simpler lens, where the language remains lyrical, the emotions are no less profound, and the narrative retains the surreal, fairy-tale like quality that marks her unique way of writing.

The story moves fluidly through dreams, memory, and reality

without ever fully separating them, where time blurs, people forget themselves, and children navigate the ruins left behind by adults. It offers young readers a message that sorrow is not only part of growing up but is survivable. As one of the main characters, Anil, reflects late in the story, growing up didn’t mean feeling less pain, it meant understanding that pain, no matter how deep, will pass. The novel trusts that children can handle the truth, not by avoiding the darker parts of life, but by giving them words to name their experiences.

It has been both a joy and an honour to translate this work, and to follow in the footsteps of Kong Rithdee, whose translations of Veeraporn’s first two novels I greatly admire. I’d like to extend my deepest thanks to M.R. Narisa Chakrabongse, whose trust in me made this translation possible.

Chapter 1 Shipwrecked in a Sea of Blankets

Waking up gives a feeling like plunging, tumbling, or falling, but not downwards. It’s more like rising upwards from the bottom of the black depths of sleep into a world of murky blue. It was the place where Yiwa found herself every morning in the same position, lying still on her side like a sunken ship in the shape of a twelve-year-old girl abandoned on the shore, one side of her face and one eye submerged beneath the tangled ripples of an ocean of blankets and the other gazing straight ahead at the thin curtain that hung from the ceiling to the floor, which sometimes made Yiwa think of someone pouring syrup into a glass of lime juice. Other times, it was the nameless river that had flowed hidden within another river for thousands of years unknown, which she had heard about in a documentary.

But sometimes, she thought of the dream she’d just dreamed, hazy, disjointed, and completely unrelated to that moment, or to the lime juice, or to any river at all. Once she even saw the flamingo from her dream perched in lonely solitude on the rail of her balcony, and another time she saw the gentle swish of a

blue tail through the gap between the curtains slipping out the window and it took a while for her to remember it was the tail of a fighting fish that had swum through the air above an empty street with thousands of other faded fighting fish in a dream she’d had several nights earlier.

And sometimes, although it was only very occasionally, her mother whispered from the hazy background, If I didn’t have you.

She’d turn to look and see the empty bed and would realise it was her mother’s voice speaking from her memory. She still hadn’t come back, and it was in moments like these when a chill out of nowhere would engulf Yiwa from head to toe, frigid, arid and sorrowful, like that boy in the story might have felt when the Snow Queen kissed him to protect him from the grievous injury of the glass shard lodged deep in his eye and turned him into a statue of ice, unable to feel for all eternity.

Once she was certain she was actually in the real world and not still stuck in the fragile junction between sleep and waking, Yiwa would rise from her bed, glance left and right to make sure her cat, Bo Be, was not there and relinquish the stiff waves of the blankets before leaving her room to go downstairs, so skinny it was impossible to tell if she was a boy or a girl, half-running, half-jumping, pink hair bouncing above the steps as she descended like a cue mark dancing above the lyrics on a children’s television programme.

And it was in those moments that the chilling curse pursued her, perhaps clinging to her ankles and knees before gradually falling away, and by the time she’d reached the bottom of The Curious Construction, Yiwa would no longer feel the sorrow of the boy with the shard of glass in his eye.

The building was a seven-storey structure built on such a tiny piece of land that each floor had only one room. It stood awkward

and alone at the end of an alley packed tightly with one or twostorey houses that spread out horizontally. People said the original owner had dreamed of living in a tall building like those in The City of Glass, and he gradually added rooms, stacking one on top of another, floor by floor by floor.

But the reason Yiwa named it The Curious Construction was not because of its towering smallness akin to a miniature skyscraper, but because of the assortment of rooms, which were all different in shape and appearance, some wooden, some brick, some igneous rock, some corrugated iron, and some glass framed with rusty green steel specked with scorched orange rust. Otherwise, they were made of concrete.

Besides that, the insides of each room were painted different colours, betel red, kalavinka egg green, the deep blue of a stormy sea, dusty rose petal pink, ripe lemon yellow, the purplish grey of evening mist, and mandarin orange that made you feel as if its tangy scent was wafting out when you looked at it. Sometimes. Some rooms were larger than others with the walls protruding, making some of the other rooms look smaller or sunken in. Some rooms didn’t have balconies, while some did, jutting out into the air or cutting into the room. In the same way, the balconies were all different from each other – some enclosed by iron railings tinged with bluish-green rust, and some by intricately carved wooden panels that were so damaged that the patterns were no longer visible. Others were crumbling concrete pillars with statues of women with tilted heads holding lanterns with dimly flickering lights at one corner.

In truth, it didn’t look much like a building. It was more like a giant stack of boxes that someone had randomly collected from different places and carelessly piled into a strange tower, wobbly and crooked with a black iron staircase zigzagging down the side

like jagged teeth, which Yiwa half-ran and half-jumped down every morning, holding everything in place and keeping it from falling apart.

And Yiwa’s room was the one that was the purplish grey of evening mist on the seventh floor. In front was a wooden frame around cloudy glass like a greenhouse, and a balcony enclosed by delicately patterned greyish-green iron railings, jutting into the air. One end was broken off, leaving a gap for Yiwa to sit with her legs dangling over the edge. Some afternoons, it became a seat for scattering cosmos petals, or for blowing rainbow-tinted soap bubbles that drifted through the alley, causing passersby to look up, wondering where the delicate petals or floating bubbles had come from.

The other end of the balcony was occupied by Uncle Banyan, an elder relative who had been blown from his pot on the roof by a storm and got stuck on the railing when he was still a sapling. Since then, his roots had gradually reached down in winding brown strands like rivers on an old map all the way to the ground below and grown into an enormous banyan tree with sprawling branches.

And it was those sprawling branches that blocked Yiwa’s view and forced her downstairs every morning.

To watch the sunrise.

Chapter 2 The Triplet Dogs Under the Kalavinka Egg Green Window

Every morning, as soon as Yiwa reached the ground floor, she would pause for a minute to breathe the fresh clean air into her lungs before tiptoeing towards Grandpa Rose Apple, another elder relative, who could be seen standing as a looming dim shadow at the end of the alley, past the triplets lying side by side under the window of Grandpa Saprang’s kalavinka egg green room as quietly as she could.

The triplets were dogs – three dogs with narrow heads, upright ears, jet-black eyes, and dark brown fur, identical in size, shape, and face as if they had come from the same factory, but that wasn’t what made them seem like triplets as much as how they were always seen together doing everything in unison.

They would step out to run with the same front and back leg and suddenly stop together, flicking the same side ear together, sticking their tongues out and drooling a string of saliva together, tilting their heads back and swinging their noses through the air

at the same angle and the same speed, howling at the same pitch, turning left and glancing right, moving every part of their bodies in unison as if they were a single dog split into three, causing those who saw them for the first time to think they were hallucinating and struggle to maintain their balance.

And they would lie sprawled out in a line beneath Grandpa Saprang’s window, resting their heads on their crossed front legs without anyone knowing why, waiting for someone, who was none other than Uncle Chit, the car mechanic who lived in the room the deep blue of a stormy sea on the third floor, to come stomping down the stairs and swing his leg carelessly at one of them, also without anyone knowing why.

At that moment, all three would leap into the air together, as if they’d all been kicked, flying and scattering in all directions before falling on the ground together just as Uncle Chit began to walk away with his usual noisy click click. Then they would run as if rolling back to each other and race past him into the alley. From that moment, no one would see them again until evening when they’d burst back in, swerving left and right in unison, weaving through the alley in a pack resembling a pile of smoked fish on a raft.

Even though Yiwa felt sorry for the triplet dogs, the morning drama was entertaining and Yiwa wasn’t surprised that Uncle Chit took pleasure in kicking them every single day, and despite miraculously exploding them, he still looked hungover, dispirited and lifeless, his face expressionless as he ground his teeth with every step he took, his hair wild and uncombed, his face never showing any sign of vitality.

Her mother had told her that Uncle Chit had a painful past.

In his youth, he’d fallen in love with a woman who’d broken his heart by leaving him for another man in The City of Glass, and on

the night that he’d been arrested on account of being drunk and disorderly, after quelling the pain that hounded him with every passing minute, he’d picked up the gun that had been carelessly left on a table by a policeman and shot himself in the chest.

But he didn’t die and continued living with a heart that had been shot to pieces, the noisy click click which emanated from the emptiness inside him reverberating through the alley each morning.

There are no bad people in the world, Yiwa, her mother had told her. There are only people whose hearts have been shattered into pieces.

The click click reminded her of the boy who had been turned into a statue of ice by the Snow Queen. The story said that the demons had got up to mischief and created a giant mirror, so wicked that whoever looked in it would see themselves as ugly and grotesque as clearly as if it were their real reflection, deceiving them into believing they really were that way, and hating themselves until they had no happiness, since a person with no happiness becomes angry and frustrated and eventually turns evil.

The invention brought immense satisfaction and pride to the demons until they couldn’t resist showing off the wicked mirror to the demon king, but as they were carrying their evil creation across the sky together, they started arguing about who should get the credit for inventing it, and as they were bickering and hitting each other, one of them accidentally broke the mirror, but ironically, they were even more pleased that the shards of the broken mirror had been scattered all over the world, and their cackles echoed across the sky.

And one of the gentlest boys – that boy – looked up at the sound, and a tiny shard of glass was blown into his eye, causing everything he saw through it to become ugly. The whole world was cloudy, he hated himself and the world, and he was angry