It all started with Grandmother, who fell in love with the American officer John Fulton Rea from Eden, Vermont, who left her in the lurch and returned to his homeland. Grandmother's wish to settle down in Eden at last was not granted. So it remains for her grandson, the narrator, to take his grandmother to Eden posthumously. With the urn containing her ashes in his luggage, he travels to all the places she once wanted to stop over at on her way, all the way to Eden, where he strews her ashes over the dead colonel's grace. With his grandmother's savings he buys the colonel's house; his neighbor is the latter's uncle, and his faithful roommate is malaria, which he caught in Surabaya. The attacks come in batches, and he writes down the memoirs of his journey the same way in seven notebooks.