This collection of stories shows the beauty of the author’s writing, which captures life’s ups and downs and blows a bright breath into diverse emotions that words cannot express.

Cho Hae-jin puts color in the lives of people who are in the darkest place of society, such as immigrants, adopted children, laborers, and poor people who are neglected. This book also puts a lens on the lives of society’s marginalized, including a middle-aged woman battling with cancer with no one to rely on, underage laborers who work without knowing what mercury poisoning is, and young people who spend their youth without obtaining any visible achievements.

Incidents like an end of romance are variated into a death of a friend from school (“Bright Tree Top”), a miserable factory accident that causes an underage laborer to lose consciousness (“One Breath”), and a shameful incident that forces a father to run away and leave his daughters at home (“High and Slow Forgiveness”). The author catches the tail of a story that is nearing a conclusion and blows a breath into the hidden stories of individuals who are crouching behind the scenes.

In “One Breath,” ‘I’ is a contract teacher at a specialized high school. One day, when ‘I’’s contract is coming to an end, ‘I’ hears that a student named Hana has gotten into a serious accident at the factory where she had gone for practical training and has lost consciousness. Along with Hana’s tragedy, the death of boys who were poisoned by mercury in “Sowing Night” and the inner conflict of a novice reporter who takes the position of a reporter dismissed without cause in “Between Boundary Lines” embody the social evils that are still prevalent today.

In “A Person in Snow,” ‘I’ and Yeo-jin conduct oral history research of a publishing company and come to meet Choi Gil-nam, who took part in the killing of North Korean soldiers by the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Choi Gil-nam has lived a life of guilt for having killed others to protect his own life. He secretly confesses a sincere moment: amid bombardment and shivering in fear, he had risked his own life to save “a feeble life with short limbs and a thin torso.” This handful of brilliant moments unveils another aspect of Choi Gil-nam, who is an easy target of an outpouring of criticism.

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