This book is a collection of eight short stories. Ladybugs Fly from the Top, the title story depicts a young university graduate and job seeker who tastes fear of failure and the despair of youth. A Walk with Rousseau deals with the tragic clash of dreams and the dark side of capitalism through the story of a young foreign worker from Bangladesh who is charged with murdering a fellow foreign worker. Conch Shell Republic is the story of a successful conference interpreter who feels that her life is empty, that she is “all bones, without a bit of flesh remaining, nothing more than a skeleton.” The Woman Who Makes Books is a lament about the death of paper books, or indeed literature, expressed through the story of a woman publisher who becomes embroiled in a murder case in the corn fields of Iowa. Dumpling House by the Yalu River gives insight into the social and ideological factors leading to the division of Korea through the story of a man who gets a mysterious phone call that leads him to China in search of news of an uncle living in North Korea. Napoleon’s Triangle is about a photographer who is lost in the maze of life, battling loneliness and trying to find some sense of stability through a relationship with a Japanese gardener. The Indispensable Lunchbox delves into the unstable world of a part-time university lecturer who ends up looking after a student who is on the run from the police, feeding him the lunchboxes that his girlfriend prepares for him. Six Droplets of Water is the story of a fireman who is studying to take the national civil service exams, whose childhood memories of a tragic incident with fire overlapping with his present newly wedded life.