He existed now in a liminal zone

"Such a shame that a tough fellow like him could pass away in the blink of an eye," Sister Zhou said, and sighed. "I can't help but to think that sometimes a man can be as frail as a mosquito! One swat might not kill a mosquito, but it can surely kill a man."

This novel is grim, but not quite in the way the title might imply. The Morgue Keeper, by Ruyan Meng, does not delve into the tedium or unpleasantness of the occupation per se. Rather Qing Yuan, framed by his proletarian and somewhat absurd experience, bears witness to all manner of death, physical and spiritual. 

Set amid Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Qing Yuan's existence is indeed meager, but he seems to hold no resentment against the regime that executed his father for hiding some gold. He is kind and compassionate with his coworkers, his neighbours, the local beggars.

When an identified female corpse, mutilated beyond recognition, comes into the morgue — "a heap of gore and waste" — and no one claims her, he starts asking questions, looking to restore her dignity. This clinging to humanity allows Qing Yuan to rise above his day to day, and even harbour hopes of having a family one day (a neighbouring widow becomes a romantic interest).

One day, Qing Yuan is arrested. He is carted away along with several other employees of the hospital and imprisoned. Then the torture begins.

The charges relate to his family's capitalist past. But it's clear that anyone disgruntled or overzealous might've played a role. This is a state where neighbours denounce neighbours, children denounce their own parents. Struggle sessions, akin to Two Minutes Hate, punish transgressors and strike fear in everyone. This is an intense read, a dystopia that's a direct descendent of 1984, only it's real. It's 1960s China, the squalor and desperation of Worker Villages.

Qing Yuan is ultimately released by the authorities but he is shunned. His actions are scrutinized, his home repeatedly vandalized. He seems broken beyond repair.

He had long since given up on the city. Nothing stirred any connection to his past. In fact, he realized, he was wrong to say he had given up on the city. The city had given up on him, discarded like a dead baby from the hospital the moment he’d been conscripted to the morgue. He existed now in a liminal zone, between a past to which he could never return and a future that would never come. The eternal present, what many a sage declared the one true refuge, had seized him like a spider in its web. He had become a shadow whose life had been bent to a single purpose, the cleaning of humans, dead, on their way to becoming shadows themselves.

But then there's a kitten.

Excerpts 
Chapter 1 
Chapter 9 

Review 
Metropolitan Review: The Exilic Style 
Interviews
Bookish: Quiet Tragedies and Small Acts of Kindness 
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