Saha
Cho Nam-joo
Liveright: 2022
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Before the Korean author Cho Nam-joo was born, her father and uncle made a deal: if baby Cho turned out to be a boy, her uncle, who already had five daughters and wanted a son, would ‘take the child as his own’. Cho’s first novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, is a worldwide bestseller and is credited with inspiring ‘a new wave of women’s rights activism in East Asia’, according to the Financial Times. What drew millions of readers (me among them) to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was, in part, its ruthless vivisection of the patriarchal imperatives that goad men like Cho’s father to hatch such deals for their children. The novel is artfully slung between two modes that rarely meet: the polemic and the case history. In a series of clinically detached notes, a male psychiatrist recounts the psychic unravelling of Kim Jiyoung, a housewife who starts taking on the personalities of other people. The book, which follows Jiyoung (whose name is the Korean equivalent of ‘Jane Doe’) from childhood up to her marriage, is also a scorching indictment about the everyday sexism that women in South Korea experience: misogyny as omnipresent and inescapable as asbestos or mould. With its liberal use of footnotes, the novel feels closer to exposé or ethnography. Cho told the New York Times that she ‘wanted [the] story to not just be a work of fiction, but a very likely true-to-life biography of someone out there’.

If Cho caught lightning in a bottle with Kim Jiyoung, she opts for something more speculative, but no less urgent, with her second novel translated into English (once again by Jamie Chang). Set in the near future, Saha is a dystopian tale that revolves around a group of ‘untouchable’ individuals exiled to the Saha Estates, and their intertwining fates. It’s at once a novel of ideas—intensely preoccupied with questions about what members of a community owe to one another and what makes a family—and a well-paced thriller that builds to a Grand Guignol conclusion.

• Tags: Cho Nam-joo, Issue 29, Korea, Rhoda Feng