South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD countries, South Korea is ranked at number 5 for working hours, and at number 33 for worker productivity. The anthropologist David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs, would have had a field day studying Korean office workers and their creative strategies for seeming busy.

Sohn Wong-pyung’s Counterattacks at Thirty takes place in an environment that epitomizes the working culture described above: a hagwon. These are private academies, usually for children, where customers can take evening classes. Such private academies usually offer supplementary study for children, and are a perennial feature of Korean high streets. This one though, the Diamant Academy, is aimed at adult self-improvement, and is owned by a concrete company who have branched out into the education and culture industries.

The book is narrated by Jihye, who is an administrator at the hagwon, and who stresses her ordinariness to the reader. In fact, Jihye, a master of passive aggressive behaviour and avoidance. She uses her imaginary boyfriend Jeong-jin (his name translates to something like really-real) to avoid company dinners and other work functions. But it’s when she meets Gyuok, a new intern, that things get extraordinary, and Jihye gets drawn into this idea of turning passive aggression into active aggression.

Together, with two other men Muin and Mr Nam, they decide to stage low-level rebellions against the people who have mistreated them: they start with their neglectfully unhygienic department head, Mr Kim, leaving him a cut-out ransom style note telling him to cover his burps and amend his other hygienic misdemeanours. They move on to Han Yeong-cheol, a celebrity and politician who plagiarized business ideas from Mr Han. These people and more fall victim to Gyuok’s pranks.

Often white collar rebellion narratives are a group of same-sex people banding together in solidarity: Hollywood films such as Nine to Five or Office Space, for example. But here Jihye joins an otherwise male group. There’s definitely a more than platonic attraction between Jihye and Gyuok that adds another dimension to the book, though it is certainly not a romance.

Throughout the book, various aspects of Korean white collar life are either described with verisimilitude or satirized, from the competitive desire for self-improvement to office politics, to hiding one’s modest living conditions from parents, to celebrity lecturers’ demands for coffee.

The question of the relevance of “liberal arts” is another of the book’s themes: where are the arts and humanities in a lifestyle that places such emphasis on climbing the corporate ladder? Jihye’s brother Jihwan is skeptical, seeing such subjects as a frivolity. More crucial for the book’s satire is the Diamant academy’s approach to liberal arts: their old guard of instructors consists of professors who simply read out their previously published books, while the new wave of instructors being brought in are social media-savvy influencers who specialize in self-help. Jihwan claims he doesn’t even know what liberal arts is, and Sohn herself seems to be suggesting that Korean culture is using the name without the deeper relevance.

One of the aforementioned influencer-lecturers is Kong Yun, a celebrity popular online and on TV talk shows. When Jihye recruits her to teach at the academy she realises that this is the grown-up version of another Jihye, one she went to school with and with whom she has some unfinished business. Bringing Jihye’s simmering resentment towards her childhood friend  into the present day allows Sohn to play with the concept of han, the Korean-configured feeling of anger in response to historical injustices.

Though hilarious and insightful, the reader may expect an escalation of these pranks and rebellions that never quite materializes, leaving an unfinished feeling. However, the point here is that although the pranks are small, they nonetheless have immense personal significance for Jihye, who learns she is not as ordinary and insignificant as she had thought.

John A Riley is a writer and former university lecturer based in Newcastle, UK.