The fulcrum of Kim Keum Hee’s delicate, melancholy novel is the tragic fire that broke out in 1999 in an illegal beer hall in Incheon, whose tragedy derived not merely from the impersonal randomness of a fire that cut fifty-seven lives short that day, but the proprietor’s heinous act of barricading the only exit in fear of his fleeing patrons skipping out on their bill. The symbolic weight of this act has its roots in in the Korean economic boom of the 1960s and 1970s, when the blind pursuit of profit trampled the working class, depriving them of human rights. Kim’s characters are not heroes of the economic boom, but contemplative, modern-day losers; and for this very reason, in their distance from the disenchanted Russian roulette of compulsive gain, are heroes of another kind—of the anachronistic world of a bygone Korea, one which is less cynical, less willing to accept dehumanization as the price of progress. 

     Kyungae, an office worker at a sewing machine company, dares to take part in a protest against unfair firings and is punished with the menial task of distributing office supplies. This is how she meets Sangsoo, an insecure and eccentric forty-seven-year old with an overbearing father (his managerial position is his father’s doing) and nighttime hobby of dispensing advice online in the guise of a woman. The advice is just as made up as his identity, as it mimics the dynamics of films light-years away from Sangsoo’s reality (for instance, the romantic comedies starring Julia Roberts, from Pretty Woman to Notting Hill, with their consolatory parables of everyday men and women who find prestige and happiness through love). What Sangsoo wants to restore with his advice column is a stereotypical hope, which is alien to the East and to the bleak landscape of sewing machines inhabited by Sangsoo. Indeed, the only English Sangsoo knows are words from pop songs like “love,” “crazy,” and “New York.” Still, he chooses to answer only the letters he considers authentic, which are also the unhappiest. It is in this very correspondence between authenticity and affliction, Hollywood idealism and unrealistic hope, that Sangsoo finds in Kyungae a kindred spirit. The two, united by their shared social failures as well as the loss of a mutual friend in the tragic fire, form a tender relationship lined with subtext, similar to the sensational couple in Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron; whose relationship is narrated silently by the vacant houses they break into.Likewise, Kyungae and Sangsoo’s love, disembodied, chaste, and shot through with quiet idealism, is conveyed through the stifling, run-down atmosphere of Incheon, or of its insignificant corners. These have the narrative purpose of representing the squalor of capitalism and indeed, make Sangsoo feel like a mere object. 

     These places are also familiar to the writer, who was born and raised there, and who wanted to represent them unadorned. He tells a story that, albeit fictional, has the meditative sense and style of a documentary. In parallel, we have the idealized space of the internet. At once simplified and dreamy, it’s the only place where love seems truly possible: it is the site of both Sangsoo’s hope-filled advice and, in an online forum for movie buffs, the place where Kyungae had met E, the friend who perished in the fire. The internet, between David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts, is presented as the only place spared from industrial homogenization. The book’s reflection on the corrosive presence of capitalism and its consequent redefinition of the concept of “human” is conducted covertly, in the dialogue exchanged between the characters. For example, his colleague, Cho, explains how the Korean word mishing (“sewing machine”), comes from the English “machine,” which was naturalized in Japanese and then carried over into Korean. Sangsoo and Kyungae move through a desert of unspecified machinery, not just sewing machines (which, according to Mr. Cho, make us human by creating the clothes necessary for our encounter with the other), but the entire modern world, which has subordinated feelings to profits and humans to products. Kim’s narrative operation resembles something like kintsukuroi: the traditional Japanese art of repairing cracked pottery not by hiding it, but by highlighting the exact trajectory of the damage. Likewise, the Korean novelist, with deft and entirely unshowy strokes, seeks to repair something broken: a fault in the social fabric, a discrepancy in the narrative of History. For to tell is to repair. It is to give events a second chance.

Translated by Jamie Richards

Viola Di Grado

Writer, BlueHunger (Bloomsbury, 2023)