I just had to log in and comment.
I found the narration good, I rather liked the contrast of the 'flat' narration in contrast to what was going on in the story.
But, once again, I plea - if the author went through the trouble of setting the story in a place that really exists, please pronounce the name of that place correctly! 'Mai' in Chiang Mai is not pronounced like the name of the month May. The ai is pronounced as the personal pronoun 'I.' Chiang Mai is a well-known tourist destination, it can't be that hard to figure it out!
Lots of the other Thai names and terms were terribly mispronounced - not surprising. Again, I offer my services to narrators reading stories set in Thailand. I will give you free pronunciation training! It would be my pleasure! I understand that most people will not understand that phuu yai baan is pronounced pu yay ban (the /ph/ indicates a soft /p/ as opposed to an aspirated /p/). (And yet, our narrator sometimes pronounced it fuu and sometimes puu ...)
As for the exoticism mentioned by InfiniteMonkey - it was actually quite well-done in terms of Thai culture. Loi Krathong is a real ceremony in which people send their SINS down the river on little boats made of leaves and bamboo and styrofoam with lotus flowers and little coins. Getting rid of the sins also gives one the chance to get merit and get what one desires. This was a very nice twist on the Thai ceremony - and takes note of the fact that, in fact, poor kids downstream often fish the boats out of the river to take the money. It's considered very sinful, as you are now getting the sins of the person who send the boat downstream in the first place. But I liked the twist of making these desires.
Which leads to something that just kept on bugging me. These are Buddhists. Desire is tanhaa, it leads to sin. Desire is the source of evil. I was waiting for the author to more explicitly pull that in. It was ironic that the act of making people's dreams and desires come true led to nice results for many of the people, if not for the protagonist - I suppose his ending was the most Buddhist of all the stories, in that it demonstrates that life is transient and ephemeral.
So, for me, this was a strange fusion of some of the features of Thai ceremony and Buddhism but all within a very Western framework of magical realism. I don't know if I liked that or hated that. It is hard to listen to a story that is set in a place that one knows very well and let go of disbelief.