Eating out alone in Korea is not the done thing: minimum orders are often for three or four, and restaurants have an intensely communal atmosphere. Some coffee shops and restaurants have installed giant plush Moomins, Pengsoos and other characters so that solo drinkers won’t feel so alone (this may have inspired the cover of Table For One, which shows an anthropomorphic Zebra diner).
Since 2017, Korea has seen the rise of honbap, the culture of dining alone, and a more general culture of honjok: pride in doing things alone in a collective culture. This is the kind of everyday detail that Yun Ko-eun’s writing focuses on. She burrows into everyday details such as the trend towards solo dining, working at them until they become obsessive and strange.
In the book’s title story, which opens the volume, a woman joins a class that teaches her how to eat alone: how to busy yourself with a book or magazine, and how to eat Korean barbecue with an appropriate rhythm. Yun’s sensitivity to social awkwardness is rooted in everyday life, contrasted with her imagining a secretive fight club-like organization for solo diners. More to the point, it’s the pain and shame of social exclusion that leads this character to need to dine alone.
In “Sweet Escape”, residents of an apartment building let a creeping fear of bedbugs take over their lives, until one man has to perform an unusual sacrifice for the sake of the others. Once again there is an unusual organization, a resident’s association that morphs into WWB: World Without Bedbugs.
These first two stories set a precedent for the rest of the collection: obsessive characters and uncannily strange worlds that are a distorted yet insightful reflection of contemporary Korea. “Roadkill” imagines a worker visiting an isolated and snowbound motel which is inhabited only by vending machines. Yun evocatively brings to life this strange settin—not a Gothic haunted house but a sterile, budget-range version of the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s The Shining.
“Hyeonmong Park’s Hall of Dreams” is for me the most imaginative of the nine stories: an entrepreneur has moved on from various less-than successful ventures to the business of dreaming: he engages in the oneiric labor of dreaming, which he then retells to his customers as if they were their own dreams. This is likely a commentary on the monetization of our private, inner selves, but it’s also an intriguing and atmospheric piece of speculative fiction.
“Invader Graphic” is somehow the most abstract story in the collection. It deals with a struggling novelist who writes in public places such as department stores. There’s a self-consciousness to her need to find somewhere where she’ll be undisturbed that recalls the title story, and a pushing back against the inevitable that recalls “Sweet Escape”. This story challenges the reader to make connections between the novelist’s predicament and her fiction: a banker who keeps noticing street art based around the video game Space Invaders.
It was only after reading this story that it clicked that there’s at least one such invader graphic in my adoptive home of Daejeon. This shows Yun’s knack for picking up on every day details and estranging them: a smell of cilantro that may signify bedbugs, or an unusual graffiti tag that may be a mysterious attempt at communication.
Other stories in the volume deal obsessively with body piercings, Iceland as an ideal place to move to, and the contents of a time capsule that is opened too early. While some of the stories feel like more major works than others, the collection achieves the right balance between variation and consistency to read as a satisfying book.
The book’s final story is its longest: “Don’t Cry, Hongdo” runs to fifty-seven pages and is almost a novella. A child finds her mother’s obsession with health food constraining and contrives to set her up with her attractive and charismatic teacher. This is the most down-to-earth, “slice of life” story in the collection, and though the characters are well-drawn, this story does feel somewhat out of place in this collection.
Table For One was Yun’s debut work in Korea, published back in 2010, and has been translated into English following the international success of The Disaster Tourist. While The Disaster Tourist’s Anglophone reception saw it positioned as a crime novel, Table For One shows Yun as a varied writer capable of taking on horror, science fiction, and literary fiction. Readers prone to self-consciousness or nagging obsessions will likely find something cathartic in these imaginative yet all too real tales.