Amy Tan Spins An Enchanting Ghost Story

“The Hundred Secret Senses” By Amy Tan (Putnam, $24.95, 358 pages)

“Libby-ah.” Ever since she arrived in America in her late teens, Kwan has had trouble wrapping her tongue around her beloved half-sister Olivia’s name. “Libby-ah,” Kwan would say when the two shared a bedroom and Kwan scared little Olivia with her stories of ghosts she saw with her “yin eyes.”

And “Libby-ah” is what Kwan says now more than 30 years later, as she gives Olivia unwanted advice on everything from what she should wear (“Libby-ah, why do you have so many black clothes? You should wear pretty colors!”) to how to reconcile with her estranged husband, Simon (“Libby-ah … Why not forgive? Stubborn and anger together, very bad for you”).

For Olivia, the Chinese-American photographer who narrates Amy Tan’s enchanting new novel, “The Hundred Secret Senses,” Kwan is “like an orphan cat, kneading on my heart… . And when I can’t bear it any longer, I lash out and tell her she’s crazy.”

And really, Olivia has to tell herself that Kwan is just odd and not crazy when Kwan talks about events in her former life - as one-eyed Nunumu - as if they happened yesterday instead of supposedly in the 1860s. Or when Kwan chats with ghosts as if they are right there in the room with her. Olivia also has to suppress the guilt she has for betraying Kwan’s confidences as a child, as well as the memory of the time Kwan conjured up the ghost of Simon’s great lost love, Elze - and Olivia thought she sensed the dead girl too.

In both of her two previous novels, “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Kitchen’s God Wife,” Tan proved adept at weaving multiple voices and stories into her narrative. Here she alternates Olivia’s story of present-day occurrences with Kwan’s tales to “Libby-ah” of her past life more than a century ago - of how she came down from the mountains and lived in the Ghost Merchant’s House with the missionaries.

Love. Loyalty. Family. Fate. These are the strands with which Tan spins out a ghost tale like no other. And by book’s end, it’s no surprise that “Libby-ah” has come to believe in the hundred secret senses - and sights unseen except by “yin eyes.”