Let’s Call Me Marilyn Monroe, the second novel by writer Han Jung-hyun, who meticulously records the gaps in history and sheds light on the obscured present, has been published. It is her second novel in three years, following Juliana Tokyo, which won the Writer of the Day Award. This novel continues Han's exploration of what can be called the "Han Jung-hyun Universe," where she uncovers forgotten or marginalized names missing from official history, or erased by mainstream narratives, and pieces together their lives in fiction to redraw the map of history.

Using the format of a detective story, the novel begins with Seol-young, who has lost part of her memory, and Yeon-jung, who cannot escape her memories, as they track down the "Sherlock" hidden within Seol-young's missing memories. Through the people they encounter—each with their own untold stories—Han Jung-hyun resurrects the names and makes eye contact with those who were not recorded in official history and were left unprotected by the public system. Once again, the seemingly unshakeable genealogy of violence that pervades capitalized history is replaced by a genealogy of love.

I wanted to linger forever at the end of this dazzling novel, remembering that it would allow us, whose memories are forbidden, to live on eternally.
— Cho Yeo-jup, novelist

Watson doesn’t come up with any plausible deductions or solve the case, but he records and preserves.
Of course, he doesn’t just copy the facts as they are; he reconstructs them in his own way.
That was probably what the novel was—a detective story, a method of tracing truth, created by Conan Doyle.
— From the text

Mystery, perhaps romance, and historical fiction: Researcher Yoon Seol-young, living in Japan, lost part of her memory a few years ago due to a sudden accident. One day, she receives an email from a friend who disappeared around the time of the accident. The friend’s nickname, Sherlock, comes to mind before even the name. The two were once inseparable and had co-authored a short paper on a public health case study concerning a female partisan survivor. Coincidentally, an academic opportunity related to the paper arises in Korea, prompting Seol-young to reconnect with Sherlock. Returning to Seoul, now unfamiliar after years away, Seol-young teams up with Sherlock’s former plastic surgeon, Goo Yeon-jeong, to unravel the cryptic clues left behind in Sherlock’s enigmatic email.

In a world where Sherlock has vanished, private detectives who call themselves Watson emerge. These Watsons embark on a journey to locate Sherlock. As they investigate the clues embedded in the email, they trace hidden locations and meet people connected to the paper. Yet, in this novel, more significant than the truths uncovered during the investigation is the 'process' itself—Seol-young recovering her lost memories and Yeon-jeong soothing her unforgettable ones. The Watsons, as they delve into memories and encounter various individuals, uncover structures of violence that have historically repeated. The people Seol-young and Yeon-jeong encounter in reality and recall in memory are victims or survivors of state violence, gender violence, and hate crimes. Partisans who were sexually assaulted by comrades in the mountains and by authorities after descending; LGBTQ individuals who had to suppress their identities to live as part of elite families; queer youth and intersex individuals who disappeared to protect the honor of their communities—these are people with stories that were either not officially recorded in history or were not saved by public institutions.

Breaking Through the Names Defined by Society, Finding a Path to You

According to the novel, the first officially recognized plastic surgery in Korea was the "cleft lip surgery brought by American forces after the Korean War." However, the characters in Han Jung-hyun's novel are more intrigued by a newspaper article from the early 1940s about "a person with both male and female traits who was restored to their true gender through plastic surgery." But why is the novel titled Let’s Call Me Marilyn Monroe? "The most beautiful and most hated face in the world," Marilyn Monroe. "People who worship beauty but then rush to destroy it when they reject it" compare other women to Marilyn Monroe, leading even women themselves to criticize her. In this "structure of power, where the powerful create divisions among the powerless," Marilyn Monroe has become an object of both adulation and scorn. Women who conformed to the system faced "the world's condemnation" and "criticism" when they tried to reclaim their lives, often intertwined with their appearance. Through Yeon-jeong, a plastic surgeon in Gangnam, the author narrates the societal contradictions that simultaneously encourage the obsession with beauty while hiding contempt for the efforts to achieve it.

As critic Kim Gun-hyung points out, while cosmetic surgery may be condemned as a materialistic act that destroys the original to conform to normative desires, for some, it is not merely about transforming an innate, unchangeable body, but about creating the self they desire. Yeon-jeong reflects, "After all, that original is something that the world has decided as being real," and "there is no original, and nothing is fixed." Yeon-jeong’s words, which are emphasized weightily in the novel, may comfort those grappling with identity and admonish those who exclude others based on hollow standards. Therefore, the title of this book might be interpreted as an intention to redefine names that have been distorted according to the classification imposed by the powerful in the lineage of violence. For you and me, in a world still full of people proclaiming grand justifications, righteousness, or providence, yet escaping that flimsy order for the sake of ourselves and those beside us.

"The things we go through still seem so similar today. It feels like nothing has ended." The world changes ever so slowly. This line in the novel might remain true as long as humanity continues to exist. However, if we can pass on the slightly changed versions of ourselves today to someone in the future, perhaps these words can be read as a message of hope. In the novella Our Wish is Science Boy, Han Jung-hyun said, "And be optimistic." In this novel, he once again emphasizes the strength of innocent optimism, affirming the existence of solid, transparent lives that maintain human dignity amidst violence (Author’s Note). Let’s Call Me Marilyn Monroe strives to speak not of easy despair, but of difficult optimism, for everyone’s courageous and simple love.

Han Jeonghyun

Han Jeong-hyun began her literary career in 2015 through the Dong-A Ilbo New Young Writers Program. She has published the novel Girl Celebrity Ivona and the full-length novel Juliana Tokyo. Her work has earned her the Writer of the Day Award and the Young Writer Award.