By László Krasznahorkai, from Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a travel memoir that will be published next month by Seagull Books. Krasznahorkai won the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.

There is nothing more hopeless in this world than the so-called Southwestern Regional Bus Station in Nanjing on May 5, 2002, shortly before seven o’clock, in the drizzling rain and the unappeasable icy wind, as in the vast chaos of the buses departing from the station bays, a regional bus, starting from the Number Five bus stop, slowly plows onward — among the other…