Even if sometimes you feel your life is stuck and you don’t know where to go anymore, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Maybe it’s just the way your life turned out. For all those who struggle to come to terms with today’s intractable world with its exhausting, everyday struggles, Won-pyung Sohn has a story which just might speak to this generation.

     Kim Ji-hye is doing pretty well. She’s young, smart, educated, and she just got her first internship. She may not be paid very well, but it’s still a legitimate start. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one thing, she is merely one among others. Many, many others. It is as if mediocrity had been assigned to her at birth. Born in 1988, a time of tremendous social and economic changes in South Korea, Ji-hye fails to excel. She graduated from a lower-tier university and gets a job at the age of thirty as an intern at a company-sponsored learning center.  Her job, even though it allows her to work in the area of arts and culture, mostly consists of photocopying lecture materials and arranging classroom chairs. She lives in a shabby basement apartment, the only one she could afford. Even her name Jihye (meaning “wisdom”) turns out to be yet another ironic disappointment. Because it was a popular name at the time, parents ended up giving their daughters the same name, to the point where she simply gets called ‘Ji-hye B’ at school. In short, the future doesn’t look very bright for someone with her background.

     Things appear to take an unexpected turn the day a new colleague gets hired at work—a young man named Gyu-ok. Ji-hye has seen him before: a couple day earlier, he was at the same café she was, and had made a scene, embarrassing one of the most prominent lectures who works at the center. Everything gets even stranger when they both join ukulele lessons and meet two other men who also blame the world for not offering them much and instead taking from them.

     At their regular meet ups at a local bar, this peculiar group of new friends decides to take revenge on the world, hoping to pave the way for others to resist the suffocating social structures surrounding them. Can such a dream, however, fuelled by resentment and copious amounts of alcohol, lead to a happier, more fulfilling life? One where justice prevails and self-realization wins over conformity?

     Sohn’s characters will speak to many readers, as they are clearly meant to represent a wide array of people. In a world of cutthroat competition, where being a good person is just not enough, where only the rarest and most brilliant individuals make it to the top, the frustrations felt by Ji-hye, her companions, and the rest of humanity are more than relatable. The constant battle between individual dreams and mass conformity is represented in the book by the juxtaposition of Ji-hye’s new friends with her other colleagues (and including her brother). The first group cries out for justice and change in the world, reminiscent of the Korean independence movement’s fighting spirit at the end of the twentieth century. The latter group just parrots the mainstream line and argues that it’s better to conform, for it leads to an easier life where everything ends up as good as it’s going to get—so long as one surrenders to the oppressive rules set by society.

     The story given to us by Sohn may or may not tell us whether defying the world order can actually succeed. However, it surely represents a generation forced to live under the enormous pressure of performing at the best of their abilities, while preserving the status quo for the sake of a stable, complacent life. This book is a bitter critique of the modern world that seems to have little to offer to younger generations who are desperate to seek their own place and purpose in it.

Łukasz Janik

Literary Translator