An island on which bacteriological weapons were tested, and a strange orphanage in which unusual children are raised... The Japanese Tower, where artificial earthquakes are staged, and the Tashkent bazaar, from which a man named Bulbul has been trying to escape all his life... The motley world of Sukhbat Aflatuni, in which modernity, the past, Russia, and the East are equally present. The book includes both already known stories of the writer, as well as new ones that have never been published anywhere.