Review by Tara Cheesman
Open Letter Books / April 2021 / 160 pages / Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho evokes loneliness and loss, the sense of a place cut off and separated from the world at large. The setting, a seaside resort town in the off season, conveys an air of romance. So does the nameless, twenty-four-year-old protagonist, the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Korean woman and an anonymous French fishing engineer. Dusapin’s use of the narrative first person, so common in the coming-of-age genre, does extra work by isolating the reader within the head of the narrator, giving the author space to explore the nuances of her story and the complicated and flawed cast of characters she encounters within an environmentally and symbolically rich landscape. The restrained voice of the narrator, sensitively rendered from French to English by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, manages to convey a surprising amount of information through the subtlest of inflections.
We are given no expectation that this young woman’s life, with seemingly so few opportunities for happiness, will turn out well. Nor does she seem to care. Her desperation manifests itself occasionally, but mostly she appears resigned and strangely indifferent to those around her. We sense she is at a precipice, one we will never get the opportunity to watch her cross or, should this end in tragedy, plunge from.
After graduating from college in the city, she has returned to her hometown and taken a job at a rundown guest house, manning the front desk, cooking for guests and cleaning the rooms. When a middle-aged artist arrives, she is immediately drawn to him. Not the type to explore or analyze her emotions, we are never told in explicit terms what her feelings are—but we sense they are complicated, nonetheless. Though he is not her father, he is the right age and same nationality. She puts him in the room next to her own. She spies on him and masturbates while listening to him work on the other side of the wall. The descriptions of his pen and ink drawings are both erotic and obliterative:
He sketched a wooden floor, filled in the details of the futon, as if to avoid the faceless body clamoring for life. He finished the background in pencil and took up his pen to give her eyes. The woman sat up. Straight-backed. Hair swept back. The chin awaiting a mouth. Kerrand’s breath came faster and faster, in time with the strokes of his pen, until a set of white teeth exploded into laughter on the page. The sound too deep for a woman’s laugh. Kerrand knocked over the inkpot, the woman reeled, tried to cry out again, but the ink slid between her lips, blacking her out until she vanished completely.
What Yan Kerrand wants from the narrator is difficult to define. He is there to finish his graphic novel, the last in a successful, multi-volume series which sends his hero (a tall, mysterious Frenchman) to different exotic locales in each book. Kerrand and our narrator develop an intimacy of sorts. She acts as his guide, taking him to the local market and driving with him to a viewing post located in the no man’s land between the borders of North and South Korea. But their relationship is a variation on an all-too-familiar trope. An older man in the midst of a midlife crisis begins a transient and undefined relationship with a beautiful young woman—think Bill Murray’s character in Lost In Translation—and then leaves without consummating it. Though we are never privy to his inner thoughts or motivations, it is easy to intuit that she is a mere object in his narrative, another figure who will appear in the frames of his book. Winter in Sokcho begins with Kerrand’s arrival at the guesthouse and ends with his departure. He participates in, but holds himself separate from, what happens in between. He refuses to even eat the Korean food she prepares, after seeing her cut herself in the kitchen on the first night of his stay. A Western tourist, he arrives and leaves with his preconception, fantasy, and agenda all comfortably intact.
It is a significant source of frustration for the narrator that Kerrand politely declines to eat the meals she serves at the guesthouse. Food is thematically important. Several passages describe the narrator preparing regional dishes with careful artistry. The narrator’s mother is a fishmonger with a stall at the local market. She is highly skilled—the only fishmonger in Sokcho licensed to prepare blowfish. Her daughter has a complicated relationship with food, acting out the classic signs of bulimia, cycles of binging and purging; the narrator is both disgusted by and disassociated from her own body. And yet her interactions with others lead the reader to believe that she is beautiful by ordinary standards.
Her fiancé, Jun-Oh, is pursuing a modeling career in the city. They have sex when he visits and he, despite his narcissism, seems genuinely to care for her. She, in contrast, is cold and distant. The significant focus in Winter in Sokcho on cosmetic surgery seems odd to American readers, but South Korea is considered the plastic surgery capital of the world. In 2019 there were over 600 clinics located in Seoul alone. Emphasizing its prevalence in that part of the world, the only other people staying at the guesthouse are a Japanese climber recovering from work she’s had done to her face and her boyfriend, who visits her on weekends. Jun-Oh, when discussing his upcoming interview with a modelling agency in Gangham, tells the narrator: “He didn’t think they’d expect him to have surgery, but if they did, he was prepared to have his nose, chin, and eyes done.” He offers to bring her back brochures from a clinic. “Everyone had things they could improve.” Her aunt offers to pay for laser surgery so she can stop wearing glasses. Her mother, also, offers to pay for an operation, though she is not specific as to what her daughter should have done:
“You think I’m that ugly?”
“Don’t be stupid, I’m your mother. But an operation might help you get a better job. I hear that’s how it is in Seoul.”
Dusapin, in translation, has unconsciously taken on metatextual concerns in her representation of this South Korean woman’s interactions with a European tourist experiencing a curated version of South Korea. The casual attitude towards cosmetic surgery, without explanation or couching for American audiences, is one example. The mental stress of living so close to the border with North Korea, which the narrator describes to Kerrand in a rare impassioned speech, is another. The complicated mother/daughter relationship, innately familiar and yet so culturally different, is still another.
And while, superficially, very little happens in Winter in Sokcho, the psychology of this fascinating young woman—who invites comparison to the 14-year-old girl in Duras’ The Lover and Esther Greenwood in Plath’s The Bell Jar—holds our attention. The plot is no more than a brief window into the narrator’s life, the hopeless monotony of which is broken by the arrival of Kerrand and will be taken up again when he leaves. Dusapin reserves the climactic moment, such as it is, for the final pages. The sinister twist, surge of violence, or outburst of emotion I anticipated never came. The narrator prepares a special meal on Kerrand’s last night at the guest house. We immediately understand, even as she does not, the futility and hopelessness of the gesture. She can never bridge the gap between them—not because it is unbridgeable, but simply because he has no interest in doing so.
In drawing there is something called negative space. It is, simply put, the shapes formed by the empty space around the objects you are drawing. An object, or group of objects, can also be defined by the absence of physical form/information. So much is left unsaid and unresolved in Winter in Sokcho. Dusapin relies on empty spaces, the blank spots in her narrator’s history and all the things which exist outside the periphery of her (and hence our) understanding. The resulting story and characters, given shape by what is missing and lost, are hauntingly beautiful. They linger within us.
Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic, National Book Critics Circle member & 2018-2019 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Judge. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, Guernica, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Barrelhouse and other online publications. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @booksexyreview and Instagram @taracheesman.