맨발로 글목을 돌다

The narrator is a novelist who carries the author's own name, and she moves between her own life and the suffering of others. One is H, the Japanese man who translates her books, taken to North Korea by force and back in Japan only twenty-four years later. Others are the women made into sex slaves for the army in wartime, and Jews deported to Auschwitz. These episodes are not told in a line: they meet and overlap at turning points, each one leading back to the same concern, how harm done to people recurs across history and how one person bears what it leaves behind. The title's 'geulmok' is an invented word for the bend where writing turns.

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About the book

Form

Short story

Length

349 pages in the original

First published

2010 by Munhak Sasang

Author's age

47 when first published

ISBN

9788970128610 (original)