In Kyung-Ran Jo’s Blowfish, two people flirt with death in their own traumatic ways, only to find themselves slowly entangled in one another. Translated from the original Korean by Chi-Young Kim, the novel unfolds through alternating perspectives and flits between Seoul and Tokyo. Blowfish privileges atmosphere over plot, unfolding as a moody and cinematic meditation on the slow ascent from the depths of depression.
Korean
It’s customary to begin writing on North Korea by acknowledging how difficult it is to get reliable information from such a secretive and tightly-controlled regime in such a highly politicized context. Though an undoubtedly repressive regime, in an information vacuum misinformation can spread, such as the easily-disproved but persistent misconception that all North Korean citizens must sport the same distinctive hairstyle as their leader Kim Jong-un.
Initially evoking the sterile chill of a dystopian sci-fi tale, with horse-riding jockey robots and humans replaced by automation, Cheon Seonran’s A Thousand Blues quickly reveals itself as something far richer: a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s uneasy coexistence with technology, as well as the contradictions of a society that both creates and undermines its own systems of care.
Kyungha, a woman living in contemporary Seoul, is burdened by the emotional toll of her past. Deeply empathetic, Kyungha experiences panic attacks and symptoms of anxiety and depression stemming from a harrowing book she wrote about a massacre in a South Korean city. When her friend Inseon suffers an accident, she asks Kyungha to travel to Jeju, an island of Korea’s south coast, to feed her pet bird which will die soon if not tended to. Arriving on Jeju in the midst of a massive blizzard, Kyungha races against the elements to reach the bird, but finds herself in a figurative space where dreams, nightmares and memories collide. phenomena in celebrity practices, cultures, politics, fandom, and economies.
One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence in 1948 in the zone of US military occupation one month before the establishment in September that year of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea) in the Soviet zone.
For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards. Lee also served as South Korea’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2004. Less known is that Lee began his career as a writer, penning novellas and short stories for literary magazines.
In a dystopia-lite future, singles in Korea opt for pseudo-marriages under the mysterious Wedding & Life (W&L for short), an exclusive and expensive matchmaking company that hosts the VIP branch of “New Marriages” (NM). In an NM, W&L clients could pay for a new spouse—either a field wife or field husband (FW or FH)—for a stipulated period. With an influx of abbreviations for each department and a list of company-exclusive terminology, the world of Kim Ryeo-ryeong’s novel The Trunk—recently released as a drama series on Netflix—is corporate and clinical, where emotion is pushed to the edges of the page.
Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
The Soyo Workshop is a pottery studio outside of Seoul that takes its name from the words for wedging clay and firing clay in a kiln. Yeon Somin has set her second novel, The Healing Season of Pottery, in the Soyo Workshop and the quaint neighborhood where it’s situated. Similar in structure and tone to Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop and other comfort novels, the familiar coffee and cats are placed with a pottery studio that is new and different.
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).
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