In 2000 Eka published his first collection of short stories, cheekily titled Graffiti in the Toilet, and two years later the huge novel Beauty Is a Wound. The pair, utterly different in many ways, immediately made him a literary star in Indonesia. The short-story collection showed his skill as a black humorist and satirist of his own generation (including PRD leaders who soon became power-hungry opportunists), and his technical mastery of the conjunction of the oral tales of his childhood village and the bourgeois culture of the post-Suharto big cities. At the other extreme, Beauty Is a Wound is a quasi-historical novel stretching from the late colonial period, through the Japanese Occupation, the Revolution of 1945–49, the long extremist Islamic rebellion of the 1950s, the rise and bloody downfall of the Indonesian Communist Party, and the early Suharto dictatorship. But the setting is not national or even regional: it is an unnamed little town close to the Indian Ocean. Nothing is documented, and everything is suffused with magic, traditional and newly created legends, and confusing oral histories.