Lee Seo-su’s story collection is like a mirror to the reality of contemporary Korean women. Reading her stories the readers encounter the instability of housing, labor, employment, the most basic aspects that define our lives and how we plan our future. “What butchers us physically is time, but what butchers us mentally is the era” (from “Mijo’s Era”) is the sentence that pierces through the ten stories in this collection. Nevertheless, the characters that the author illustrates do not break down helplessly when faced with the heartless era standing in front of them. They are not butchered. They stand up again. Holding the hands of those who remain and watch over, they march on.

Some stories depicts women drifting around in Seoul, trying to find a place to settle down or to be rooted. In “Mijo’s Era”, the protagonist Mijo has barely enough money that her father left to rent a place for her and her mother to live together. More recent works expand the theme of women’s body and subjectivity through stories that deal with unwanted pregnancy, or how women expose and use their body. In “Young Geunhee’s Parade”, Guenhee, who works as a youtuber reading books while wearing exposing clothes throws a question to her older sister Moonhee: “Why do you see our body only as something to be taken?”

Despite the fact that most of the characters are in a hopeless situation, there is a certain energy that radiates from them. It is one of the common features in Lee Seo-su’s works. It is the power ignited when they are “together”. Family members and friends who they hate and love at the same time, those relationships are so real that it is not as beautiful, sometimes sad and sometimes funny. But we all know that those are the ones who helped us march through life after all.