In 1994, Nanjing radio journalist Xinran took a call from a listener. The listener had just encountered a strange woman in the streets of Suzhou, and thought the journalist should meet her as well. Xinran boarded a bus and rode four hours to the fabled garden city. There, she had tea with an elderly woman dressed in Tibetan clothing. "Her inscrutable eyes looked past me at the world outside the window," she reports, "the crowded street, the noisy traffic, the regimented lines of modern tower blocks."

The woman's name was Shu Wen, and she was actually Chinese. Nearly four decades before, Shu Wen had gone missing inside Tibet. Now she was back in China, and at a loss to negotiate her much-altered nation. By way of explaining her disorientation, Shu Wen told Xinran her tale. Though the story needed two days to unravel, the journalist's time wasn't wasted. Sky Burial is the result.

In 1958, Shu Wen was newly married to an army doctor named Kejun. He had been posted to Tibet as part of the ongoing pacification program following the Chinese invasion of 1950. (The book prefers to present the army's work as part of the process of unifying the two countries.) On receiving a death notice for him, which declared that he passed away during an incident "in the east of Tibet on 24 March 1958," the stricken wife resolved to confirm these vague facts.

A trained dermatologist, Shu Wen got herself posted to the recalcitrant autonomous region, a place where many Chinese soldiers, obliged to march long distances at altitudes of 15,000 feet, suffered skin problems. Once inside Tibet, with only the vaguest idea of where she was and where her husband was supposed to have died -- "east Tibet" comprises a territory about the size of western Canada -- she set off to find her man. Pure love would be her guide.

Pure love soon turned into the epic love of the subtitle. A variety of misadventures transformed the Chinese dermatologist into a Tibetan nomad. Little or nothing of her previous existence survived. Years and years passed, during which Shu Wen formed new attachments and began to see reality through local eyes. "Increasingly," Xinran writes of her now middle-aged wayfarer, "she was coming to understand that the whole of Tibet was one great monastery."

Never for a moment, though, did Shu Wen forgo her original mission. For more than three decades, she sought news of her beloved. When her determination finally paid out, the reward was bittersweet. Kejun's fate had been to perform a good deed for the betterment of Sino-Tibetan relations.

For her part, Xinran tells the story with spare elegance, doing particular justice to the awesome emptiness and silence of Tibet. "No one likes crying," the journalist writes in the final pages, "but tears water our souls." Xinran's earlier book, The Good Women of China, offered a variety of personal narratives, many of them equally extraordinary. Her ambitions for her work are nakedly emotional: "to allow you to cry for the Chinese women in my books."

Sky Burial is framed by further poignancy. Xinran only spoke with Shu Wen for about 36 hours in 1994. When the journalist later called the Suzhou hotel, she found that the old woman had checked out. Despite considerable efforts, and her own visit to Tibet, the journalist never found her subject again. All the details, including long passages of dialogue between secondary characters, are based on what she gleaned from the original encounter. "I have spent many years searching for you," Xinran writes in an open letter at the back of the text. She even asks Shu Wen to contact her London publisher, should she happen upon this book.

Does it matter if a good story is made up or not? Sky Burial may prove a landmark test case. When the book was released in the United Kingdom in 2004, it was treated as non-fiction. The North American edition seems to follow suit, including quotes from British reviews and dust-jacket copy that pitches Shu Wen's story as the astonishing, stirring truth.

On the credits page, however, there is a snag. "This book is a work of fiction," a disclaimer reads in part. "Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously."

A prominent U.S. publication has already stated on record that the book is a novel that only cleverly purports to be non-fiction.

Why Xinran would choose to elaborately cloak fiction as fact (or fact as fiction) is a substantial question. One obvious reason to know if a story is "real" is in order to be able to properly gauge the decisions the author has made. For instance, if Sky Burial is to be believed as non-fiction, then it was conceivable for nomadic Tibetans to have gone about their business between 1958 and the early 1990s isolated from all news out of China. This would include any word of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Mao Zedong, the emergence of the market economy under Deng Xiaoping, or the June 4 massacre on Tiananmen Square.

Given the monumental geography of the Tibetan plateau, such innocence might have been possible. But could those same nomads have also remained oblivious to the destruction of thousands of their own temples at the hands of Red Guards, and the subsequent torturing, jailing and often executing of monks for the crime of mild political dissent? Giant monasteries generally have decent in-house communications.

Sky Burial makes no mention of the upheaval the Chinese brought to Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. Nor, for that matter, does it seriously address the subsequent colonization of the country by ethnic Chinese, a steady demographic invasion that has rendered Tibetans a minority in their own land. If anything, the text paints Tibet as outside time and politics, an elemental backdrop for musings on love everlasting and noble suffering.

If Xinran's story is a factual account, then I have doubts about the veracity of Shu Wen's memories. If Sky Burial is actually a work of fiction, then I still have doubts about the narrative, if of quite another variety. Either way, there is much to wonder about this curious book, and only some of it concerns matters that, according to the author, provide the tears that water our souls.