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.

Originally published in 2015, the novel has now been translated from Korean with the KoLab, a collaborative effort of thirteen Australian students working with The Australian National University. With a cold first-person point of view, the story focuses on a young woman, Noh Inji, who begins working as a professional wife soon after college. However, like every protagonist of a mystery novel, she has a complicated past that keeps making its presence known, haunting her through her marriages.

 

For the majority of the novel, Inji is paired with a man known as “The Husband”, who spends his time working on something like music production—the details are hazy—in a secluded office. The two have an easy life together and rarely, if ever, talk about their friends and families beyond the marriage. The NM spouse is expected to satisfy the emotional, physical, and social needs of companionship, whether that includes attending an event to support one’s spouse or having sex. However, W&L leadership made it clear to Inji that being a FW was not prostitution as it involved labour and time beyond sexual acts. In fact, clients wouldn’t appreciate it if a FW was too sexual, as it wouldn’t seem like the realistic behaviour of a spouse.

NM’s marriages function under the assumption that with a “real” marriage comes a host of emotional, physical, financial, and legal responsibilities that a contract can neatly avoid. Beyond this, it allows for experimentation with partners while keeping clearly drawn boundaries. In a real marriage, “torture” begins when “cute, pudgy feet start looking like bear paws.” To avoid disappointing their family, friends, and partners, single people are now engaging in “voluntary misogamy”.

Yet Inji carries baggage through these marriages, increasingly accumulating:

 

I had been carrying around this big trunk with me, cramming my life into it bit by bit, and it was time for me to throw it away.

 

The titular trunk is not only a reference to her childhood memories—traumatic and chaotically revealed—but also the various trunks she packs up with each of her new assignments:
 

The only thing I kept as a memento was the wedding ring… All the other little things used – slippers, a toothbrush, etc. – all went in the trash

 

In these arrangements, the past does not affect the present. However, a man Inji briefly dated begins stalking her at the NM office before eventually making his way inside her home. Through a series of events, some violent and cruel, the man from Inji’s past is mysteriously disposed of by the company. In a relatively plotless novel that focuses on the minutiae of Inji’s everyday life, the mystery around this man’s disappearance is the clearest plotline.
 

The novel’s cultural context is Korea, a country where the birth rate is the lowest in the world, and the population could halve in fifty years due to various breakdowns of social structures. Korea’s marital statistics are equally low, with the number of marriages decreasing by more than 40 percent over a decade. In such a world, the use of W&L, NM, and first wives such as Inji feels entirely plausible, and the calm informational tone of the novel had me researching whether or not such companies already exist.

 Socially and emotionally fascinating, the pace of the novel however falters towards the end as the slow-burn mundanity of a slice-of-life novel jarringly transforms to cram decades’ worth of context into a few pages. The Trunk nonetheless creates compelling characters in a fascinating and pseudo-realistic world to tell a story of mystery and suspense centred around an unreliable woman and a cast of strange characters. It’s a breezy read with a bite and asks more questions than it has space to answer.

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Mahika Dhar is a writer, essayist, and book reviewer based in New Delhi. She is the creator of bookcrumbs and her short stories have appeared in Seaglass Literary, Through Lines and Minimag among others.