Missed Connections

Blowfish by Kyung-Ran Jo, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim. Astra House, 304 pages. 2025.

Seventy-five years after the outbreak of the Korean War, many Americans have come to recognize the country through its various cultural exports—KBBQ, K-pop, K-dramas, and K-skincare, to name a few. This association, and its contrived division between culture and politics, is no accident. In the 1990s, after decades of Japanese colonial rule followed by the ravages of American military intervention, the South Korean government established a series of initiatives to “enhance the image of Korea in the World.” As the country invested in communication and IT-based businesses to develop an internet-forward and skills-based economy, the Ministry of Culture turned to the West in a movement now known as the hallyu wave. Image supplanted reality. Decades of authoritarian rule, gender inequality, and limited economic mobility were ushered offscreen as the Wonder Girls, SHINee, Girls’ Generation, and BTS (among others) ascended the world stage. The runaway virality of Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” was not a fluke but rather the fruit of years of premeditated cultural development, memorialized by a giant set of horse dance hands outside of the Starfield COEX mall in Seoul.

It is no wonder that the literary world followed suit. Prior to 1980, translations of Korean literature were primarily used as resources for visiting scholars or exchange students. But in recent decades, the South Korean government has attempted to recreate the success of the hallyu wave with “highbrow” literature, investing in translation projects and publicity campaigns for the Nobel Prize. Such an accolade would validate the artistry of literature written in hangul (the Korean alphabet) in both Western literary circles and Japanese ones—it would represent a redemption arc, given that the Japanese government long suppressed hangul to various degrees throughout the twentieth century.

Government-affiliated agencies such as the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (KLTI) and private institutions like the Daesan Foundation have worked to relocate Korean literature from the periphery of literary discourse through workshops, literary journals, and grants for emerging translators. This mission is further bolstered by independent publishers such as Tilted Axis Press, founded in 2015 by Deborah Smith, whose English translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian stirred controversy in literary circles for supposedly straying from the original text. Although the stated mission of KLTI is to better articulate the “true meaning” of “our culture to others,” many of the supported works adhere to the arbitrary distinction between high and low culture, in which highbrow skews towards the universal and the apolitical while lowbrow is steeped in the local and specific. In this light, the placeless ambiguity of prize-winner Kyung-Ran Jo’s work seems more a condition of its publication than an incidental quirk.

Written in four sections, Blowfish, Kyung-Ran Jo’s second novel to be translated into English, is a case in point, oscillating between two narrators and two cities—though it could be about anyone, anywhere. The main characters, a nameless Korean sculptor and architect, are at times frustratingly opaque, beset by profound and incommunicable sorrow. Both have lost family members to suicide; both are consumed by thoughts of death. They live in Seoul and Tokyo, which are closer to pointillist landscapes of alienation than bustling metropolises—in Jo’s hands, local details are fleeting and lilt toward solipsism. In the opening passage, the sculptor stands at sunset and compares the shadow of nightfall across Gyeongbokgung Palace to a slowly illuminating high-rise across the street.

What could have been a commentary on Korea’s stringent modernization policies instead becomes a meditation about her own suffering: “The city would glow brighter as the night grew darker. That was what a city was—a place so blinding that nobody could see you cry,” the sculptor remarks. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the expat architect ambles about in the shadow of his older brother’s suicide. When the sculptor travels to Japan for a three-month artist residency, the pair is reunited, having met once prior at a dinner for artists in their home country. From here, the sculptor’s chapters trudge toward her intended suicide via consumption of poisonous blowfish—the same method undertaken by her grandmother—while the architect narrates scattershot scenes of his family, his ex-girlfriend, and his increasing fascination with the sculptor, who he is determined to save from herself.

Nominally, Blowfish is a love story. The structure portends romance, and to that end, the novel traces the central relationship in flashes across tourist destinations. But the pair hardly interacts. Fish markets, temples, galleries—the city appears as little more than the backdrop for the emotional strife that dominates the characters’ interiorities. The material world recedes behind rumination, the plot more an elliptical catalog of sorrow than a story. In the narcissism of self-loathing, the sculptor “kept forgetting she was with someone else. She could not even remember this man’s name.” It’s hard to blame her: the architect is written as an indistinct entity, reduced to nothingness by an all-consuming guilt. He blames himself for his brother’s death, having received his brother’s final call and ill-timed instruction to “hurry up.” The architect insists on turning a family tragedy into a personal failure. His self-isolation disguised as self-effacement mirrors the sculptor’s infatuation with her own fate. They are, in other words, a perfect match.

Although narratively elusive—Jo often places reaction before event, emotion before all else—the prose is astoundingly direct on the subject of art and loss. “What artists battled against wasn’t merely fear or pain or desire or guilt,” she writes, “they also struggled against time that couldn’t be rewound and their younger selves who had lived through those times.” An author’s note assures us that Jo isn’t merely affecting lugubriousness for its own sake: “Sadness and beauty and fear and death—I write about what overwhelms me.” But Blowfish is less about sadness and beauty and fear and death as much as the impossibility of reaching through the veil of self-interest to another person. Jo’s orienting interest in lofty universalisms hollow out the novel, as even the characters grow annoyed with each other’s impermeability, as when sculptor’s only named friend, Saim, reprimands, “You’re always thinking about yourself.”

Jo has written five story collections and three novels since her 1996 debut, a short story called “The French Optical,” which won the prestigious Dong-a Ilbo New Writer’s Contest. Tongue, her first novel to be translated to English, also by Chi-Young Kim in 2009, similarly explores links between lost love, culinary obsession, and death. Tongue follows a Korean chef who, in the throes of a breakup, returns to the Italian kitchen where she trained and prepares a final, lethal meal for her cheating ex. Both novels center on women who enact culinary violence as a form of compromised political agency. Maybe. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian follows a woman that quietly resists her husband by refusing to eat meat; but Jo bristles against feminist interpretation of her work, insisting that “when I am writing, I never think of myself as a woman.”

Jo’s rejection of an explicitly political reading of her novel in favor of tepid humanism is a hallmark of the South Korean translation project. Once these works arrive in English, writers as disparate as Bora Chung (science fiction author of Cursed Bunny), Park Sang-young (whose rom-com inspired Love in the Big City has just been adapted for television), Cheon Myeong-kwan (author of the fantastical epic Whale), and Hwang Sok-yong (author of the sweeping and multigenerational Mater 2-10) are lumped together under the umbrella of literary fiction. Domestic genre distinctions are erased for market palatability; a mildly racist international readership that is uninterested in the specific Korean-ness of Korean literary production is presumed.

Critics laud these writers’ mundane apprehension of the human condition and overlook their direct engagement with the political and social traumas they have lived through. Despite the explicitly political nature of many of Han’s works—Human Acts, a polyphonic chronicle of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising; or We Do Not Part, which probes the violence of the 1947–54 Jeju Massacres—it is the relatively apolitical The Vegetarian that won Han the Man Booker International Prize, garnering Han attention abroad and ushering in Anglophonic literary interest.

Wandering through Jo’s Seoul, replete with galleries, skyscrapers and multicourse meals, it is nearly impossible to imagine the poor, agrarian country South Korea was just a half-century ago—or the economic inequality inherent to such carefully manicured city life. Blowfish regards artists as a distinct class, bound not by action or experience but by an obstinately inward orientation towards their own suffering. Although they find themselves in Tokyo and hail from Seoul, the characters in Blowfish take refuge in the rootlessness afforded by a cosmopolitanism that was once unthinkable, even in South Korea’s capital.

The novel brims with references to the West: the sculptor’s father loves Tolstoy, in Hemingway’s honor the architect’s ex-girlfriend drinks mojitos, his rumored drink of choice, and the sculptor contemplates drowning herself in a river like Virginia Woolf. That the novel takes place in East Asia is almost happenstance; its characters, living in self-exile, belong everywhere and nowhere. Jo’s artists thus have far more in common with the global creative class than other Koreans. They require little translation to be understood by and marketed to Western audiences, making them Korean international literature just as “Gangnam Style” is world music.

Despite its international bent and descriptive spareness, the world of Blowfish is tightly drawn, containing few characters and an abundance of coincidences. In Seoul, the sculptor becomes acquainted with a death cleaner—a man who posthumously removes the artifacts of those previously alive—and plans to use his services. Fearing for her life, the death cleaner warns the architect of her suicidal designs just as she prepares to consume the blowfish, allowing him to save her at the last moment.

Despite its life-or-death stakes, this climactic scene is tempered by the novel’s relentless narcissism: the sculptor relishes the opportunity to situate her impending death in a dramatic mythology of generational suffering. She wishes to escape “something that had followed her deliberately for a long time, making fun of her,” and describes her father’s family as “oppressed by the complex rule of death,” as if she were somehow exempt. As he sits in her apartment, awaiting a doctor, they remain isolated. Rather than linger on the life he saved, the architect congratulates himself for acting so promptly and lets out “a sigh of relief as he realized that he was a man, not a beast who could never shed tears.”

Here, Jo reveals the ultimate tragedy of the artistic temperament: that what compels these two toward one another is a mutual inability to connect with anything beyond themselves. The sculptor and the architect represent tangential plot points in one another’s narratives, quickly absorbed into self-interest and stale silences. Walking alone in Seoul, the architect reflects on his act of heroism, and a prior conversation he’d had with the woman whose life he has saved. “Isn’t half of life embarrassment? And the rest of it fear and greed?” she’d once asked. “He had to tell her that the truly embarrassing thing wasn’t always thinking about death and being pulled toward it, but having never loved anyone.” Another brief reprieve from the sculptor’s unrelenting self-pity comes when a friend confronts her, exasperated:

Why do you think about death all the time? It’s not because of your family history or genetics. All that is an illusion. You’re hanging on to the specter of death and you’re resigned in everything you do, because you’re secretly worried that you might not be a great artist, that you might be nobody special.

The startling clarity of these moments reveal the book’s self-awareness of how critique of any artistic (read market) proclivity toward universals impedes real connection. Love is not drawn from examining the self as a surrogate for the human condition, but from encountered details of a betweenness that the narrators deny.

If Blowfish is a scaling of our own embarrassments, the personal neurosis of those with little else to worry about, then it is an unabashed success. Although the sculptor regards the blowfish as an objet d’art—a fetishized curio of aesthetic fascination—Jo’s subject is the alienated individual as a concept rather than as a realized person. These hollow protagonists are canvases for our own self-inflicted sufferings, exclusive not to any culture but to a particular class. The subtle contempt with which Jo holds her characters is a reminder of the insidiousness of eternal ease that plagues well-off creative-types. The novel’s contribution to the Korean literary project is its demonstration that this globalized emptiness can originate, too, in Seoul. To live so divorced from the material world that it becomes indistinct is to burrow deep into yourself that you may not be able to see your way out. As one English bromide has it, wherever you go, there you are.