Welcome to Jungle! Or perhaps: the jungle? The name of the travel agency where Yona, the protagonist of Yun Ko Eun’s The Disaster Tourist, works is not a mere marketing gimmick. It’s a metaphor for the state of the agency, where the employees desperately navigate and survive complicated relations, callous regulations, and abusive employers. The Jungle agency becomes a metaphor for a contemporary society where only the fittest survive: pure Darwinism intertwined with the brutal mechanisms of capitalism, consumption, and the relentless pursuit of profit. 

    Yun makes clear that she is interested in social, even global, issues. Yet, she plays hide-and-seek with the reader. She keeps creating new, unexpected twists and turns, drawing the reader into the tangled bush of the narrative. Right from the start, she introduces the issue of sexual harassment, suggesting that this is a feminist novel. This is only a starting point for the development of subsequent events about the matter of ethical tourism. Just as the reader becomes confident that this is the message of The Disaster Tourist, Yun makes another unexpected twist and incorporates elements of the adventure novel, garnishes the narrative with a detective plot, and completes it with a comedy of errors typical of medieval literature. Finally, she creates a grand vision of a dystopian world in which natural disasters are not the work of nature, but of humans.

    There is nothing revealing in this discovery, obviously. After all, modern man has already become accustomed to the fact that—consciously or not—he contributes to the destruction of nature. Hence, Yun, wanting to heighten the literary effect and snap the reader out of a moral coma, hyperbolizes the well-known metaphor of the teatrum mundi (the world is a theater)—presenting it in a new version as “the world is a narrative”—and brings to life the figure of the demiurge who writes the diabolical scenario of triggering a disaster. This is a soulless, faceless, menacing figure—a character that manifests itself in ever-new incarnations that appear to replicate and take over other actors of this terrifying scheme. This figure also decides who will survive the disaster, who will become its victims, and how many lives must be sacrificed for the sake of the majority. This is a provocative idea, because, after all, in The Disaster Tourist, the majority is really  a minority limited to a select few individuals, with their interests in material gains. An equally provocative idea is that only death will revive life —because only a deadly calamity will create a narrative that will bring publicity to its actors. Even the novel’s ending is provocative, which I should not reveal here.

    Yun plays with these paradoxes, demonstrating her perspicacity and maturity while heightening the reader’s sense of discomfort. This feeling is exacerbated by numerous social, psychological, ethical and even philosophical problems. Yun weaves them into the narrative, only hinting at them. One must be careful, therefore, not to overlook them. For it is easy to succumb to the dynamic pace of the narrative, to be swept away by the whirlwind of these fictional events. But beneath the surface lurk serious questions that ripple through the novel’s plot and make it much more than a dystopian vision of the future. The writer keeps asking these questions and, in her insightfulness, indicates further threats to our civilization.

    There are a lot of questions, all very challenging, with no clear answers. Yun does even not intend to give any, because she is well aware that simple formulas do not exist. That’s why she carefully lays out the arguments and weighs the rationales, cautioning against hasty conclusions and black-and-white categories. This explains why The Disaster Tourist is characterized by various shades of gray. The tourism business preys on local communities, but the local community often supports the business; fabricated travel agendas feed tourists lies, but only in order to enhance their sense of empathy, to evoke human impulses. Egoism, calculation and hypocrisy intertwine with good intentions, sensitivity and sincerity, blurring the line between what is ethical and unethical.

    Yun exposes these absurdities, which invalidate the traditional division between “good guys” and “bad guys.” and with it, the problem of individual responsibility. This is perhaps one of the most important messages from the writer: we live in an era in which responsibility and remorse no longer matter, because every injustice finds its rationale and is subordinated to cold calculation. An overwhelming vision—but sincere. Not for those who would travel to see the villages of the Unda and Kanu tribes; rather, for those who are ready to confront the crocodiles.

Ewa Rynarzewska

Translator, Court Dancer (Kwiaty Orientu, 2020) by Kyung-Sook Shin

Professor, Department of Korean Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland