Life continues even in the terrifying bunker of a polluted worldAn earthquake that destroys everything in Burim DistrictLife in a dystopian bunker. 

It is one year after the earthquake nicknamed ‘The Big One’destroyed everything in Burim District, and Yujin is living in a bunker. This is the bunker Yujin found after wandering from shelter to shelter. She lives in the damp and stuffy bunker with 10 other people, surviving off any debris they can find and the survival kitsoccasionally distributed to them from the outside. The first thing that jumps out at readers about this book is the desolate life in the bunker and the ashen landscape of District Burim which wasrazed to the ground by an earthquake. Kang Young-sook, who has frequently dealt with the topics of cities and disasters in her novels, paints an even more vivid and shocking depiction of disastersin this book. In particular, the memories that South Koreans have of recent disasters— such as finedust, large earthquakes, and nuclear disasters—are combined with the novel’s landscapes, leaving truly poignant scenes for the reader.

The reason why Yujin and the other survivors of ‘The Big One’ must live in the bunker is because the government judged that Burim District was a polluted area after the earthquake,subsequently isolating it from the rest of the world. People are allowed to leave Burim District andsettle in nearby N city, but in order to do this they must first put a biometric chip in their bodiesand become ‘objects of management’. The people who cannot—or will not—do this have nochoice but to remain in the bunker. But one day, people in gray hazmat suits come into BurimDistrict carrying a large human-sized machine. It doesn’t take long before people start disappearing from the bunker and rumors start surfacing. Now Yujin, who has been sending peopleone by one to N city, begins to wonder if she can survive till the end.

At the same time, while describing the history of Burim District and showing how there were already cracks and gaps existing beneath the surface of everyday life, Kang Young-sookimagines an earthquake that instantly makes the social inequalities painfully apparent. Before ‘TheBig One’, Burim District was already a failing city. Although it enjoyed a short-lived boom fromthe iron industry, closures and suspended projects for redevelopment caused the city to beabandoned. Eventually Burim District became the home for all of society’s rejects—people who have no place to go because they have either failed in the big city or because they are sick. The image of a government that so quickly labels, isolates, and abandons a failed city where peoplewhom no one cares for live, feels less like fiction and more like the inequalities that are present inevery corner of our society today.

About the author

Kang Young-sook started her literary career by winning Seoul Shinmun’s spring writing competition with her short story “A Meal in August.” She has published several short storycollections, including: Shook, A Festival A Day, Dumbbells at Night, Regarding the Black insideRed, and Grey Literature. She has also published the novels Lina, Lighting Club, and The Sad and Cheerful Teletubby Girl. She has won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Prize, the Baek Sin-ae LiteraryPrize, the Kim Yoo-jung Literary Prize, and the Lee Hyoseok Literary Prize.