Užupis ("on the other side of the river") is, in reality, a neighborhood in Lithuania's capital city of Vilnius, which took the peculiar step of declaring itself an independent republic in 1997. In this novel, however, it is the lost homeland of a middle-aged man named Hal, who lands in Lithuania hoping to travel back to the town of his birth in order to bury his father's ashes there--in a place that might not really exist. In a literary tradition dominated by social realism, The Republic of Užupis is a unique work of melancholy, Murakami-esque whimsy.