The best books about contemporary Korean society

It came as no surprise to me, having spent so much time in the country, that Korea has long been and still is a sexist society, and this book illustrates that sexism brutally. When I lived there, my good friend, a woman, was a professor of biochemistry, and she struggled in her career the way men didn’t have to. Also, while people thought nothing of my going out to a pub with my male friends, it was somewhat scandalous when I did the same with this woman. In this novel, set in more recent times, a young woman has similar troubles trying to find her way. For many readers, it has served as a wake-up call for Korean society.

I first became aware of Han Kang through her terrific novel The Vegetarian, so when this novel came out, I was keen to read it. I was especially drawn to it because it involves Korean characters looking back at the Gwangju massacre, a horrific event that took place in 1980, just two years after I left Korea following my Peace Corps service there. When I taught at a university, anti-government demonstrations by students were already being tightly watched, and one of my students vanished in a crackdown. I never learned what happened to him, but he didn’t return to school. It was therefore fascinating to me to read these fictionalized accounts of both the incident in Gwangju and the long-term effects on survivors.

This novel is a murder mystery, of sorts, that also has a lot to say about socio-economic divides in contemporary Korea. This was particularly interesting to me because when I lived there in the 1970s, everyone was poor. No one owned a motorbike, much less a car, and they were all barely scraping by. Now, though, great wealth and privilege have emerged alongside persistent poverty, and that class divide looks too familiar to Americans. The rich are privileged and have access to things the poor do not, including justice.

This is a surreal novel that suggests a complexity to modern Korean life that I can’t say that I’ve witnessed. It’s a novel of patterns—repeated images and passages that may be indicative of what it’s like to live in Seoul at this point in time. The main character has lost her job—and an odd job it was—but she is now even more immersed in the world of artists and writers, which is another reason the book spoke to me. The book was something of a challenge, given its shifts and ghost-like characters, but that too made it more exciting.

This one is set in North Korea and is by a sanctioned North Korean writer. As a result, there is no criticism directed at the North’s restrictive society and on the surface it isn’t at all political. Instead, it shows the mundane existence of a judge and his wife, ordinary people who work hard to contribute to the development of the nation. It seems to be about traditional values, and the rising prevalence of divorce is seen as a problem. Those of us who follow Korea rarely get this kind of insight into what life in the North is really like, and while these characters may be relatively privileged, their existence is tellingly monochromatic.