An island where biological weapons were tested—and a strange orphanage where they raise unusual children… The Japanese Tower, where artificial earthquakes are staged, and the Tashkent bazaar, from which a man named Bulbul has tried to run his entire life… The colorful world of Sukhbat Aflatuni, where modernity and the past, Russia and the East coexist on equal footing. The book includes both already well-known stories by the writer and new ones that have never been published anywhere before.