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Author
Wi Soo Jung위수정
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Year Published
2024-07
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Category
Literary Fiction 소설
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Updated: 2025-02-28
- Posted by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
- Updated by Moonji Publishing co., Ltd. on 2025-02-28
Description 작품 소개
SYNOPSIS
NO NIGHT FOR US by Wi Soo Jung, the winner of the 2017 Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Award, is a collection of ten short stories exploring love and suspicion, apathy and obsession, and the surprising permeability of the thin wall between the living and the dead.
The collection opens with “No One,” which won the 2022 Lee Hyo-seok Literature Award. The story follows Heejin, who suddenly moves out of the apartment she and her husband Soohyung shared without warning or explanation. As the story progresses, Heejin processes her aversion to commitment, which may stem from her discovery of her father’s affair when she was younger, and questions whether she can have a meaningful relationship with her father, Soohyung, or anyone ever again.
The second story, “Only Afternoons on Sunday,” was selected as the winner of the 2022 Kim Yujeong Literary Award and centers around Wonhee, a woman in her late fifties who develops an infatuation with a young piano prodigy as she reckons with her own process of aging. Now an elderly woman by society’s standards and a grandmother, Wonhee becomes increasingly devoted to Go Juwan, the classical pianist whose popularity has skyrocketed recently. Recalling her own youth as a classically trained pianist and the dream she sacrificed to marry and start a family, Wonhee struggles in the present to connect with her daughter, Yuna, who has by contrast made childbearing her life’s work. Go Juwan becomes a means for Wonhee to escape such pressures. However, her fixation on the young pianist soon opens the floodgates of decades’ worth of regrets and resentment concerning her own deferred desires.
“Jane’s Humming,” the third story, centers around Hanna, a hard-of-hearing woman steadily making a name for herself as a YouTuber. Inspired by the late British-French actress and singer Jane Birkin, Hanna livestreams videos in which she dons glamorous outfits and a persona as Jane and studies while humming along to music, her face obscured, as 200,000 subscribers look on. In reality, Hanna is working toward the luxurious lifestyle she cosplays online, hoping to earn enough revenue from her channel to afford a glitzy apartment and an authentic Birkin bag. All the while, she wrestles with her longstanding inferiority complex regarding her family’s socioeconomic background and her own disability. Compared to her childhood friend Gyuhee, who was born Deaf into a wealthy family and now lives in Paris where she studies art, Hanna feels inadequate. When she learns that Gyuhee plans to settle in Paris permanently, Hanna becomes even more laser-focused on her goals, dressing more provocatively in her livestreams to earn more views and sponsorships in the hopes of obtaining that Birkin bag and all that it represents.
The title story, “No Night for Us,” follows Jisoo, a college sophomore who also trades her body for gifts, money, and other favors. Operating under the alias Anna, Jisoo has regular paid encounters with men and uses her earnings to spoil her best friend Eunseon and the nine stray cats they are co-parenting. While Jisoo feels no particular fondness toward most of the cats — save for Beth, the first stray that she and Eunseon rescued together as elementary school students — her love for Eunseon drives her to continue seeking out sex work to support what Jisoo views as their family after Eunseon drops out of college to devote her time to caring for the cats. All the while, Eunseon dreams of emigrating to England, which apparently boasts the best animal welfare system in the world, but doesn’t seem to include Jisoo as a factor in her plans. One day, Jisoo receives a request for sex from a woman for the first time, and the encounter leaves her feeling off-kilter in a way she has never experienced. She is made to confront her queerness and her feelings for Eunseon, who seems to love only her own dreams of life abroad and the cats.
In “Raising a Monstera,” recovering addict Minhee seeks a roommate with whom to share her spacious apartment in the hopes that their company might alleviate her loneliness. She believes that she’s found a decent housemate in college sophomore Jaesoon, who suffers from various allergies yet loves houseplants and wants specifically to raise a monstera. As they tend to the monstera plant gifted to them by Minhee’s mother, Minhee believes they are developing a genuine friendship. However, when she uncovers what she believes is Jaesoon’s secret Instagram account, she begins to suspect that her roommate is using her and her apartment to craft his online persona. As his posts grow increasingly disparaging toward Minhee, she decides that her roommate can no longer be trusted. Tellingly, when she evicts him, all that he cares about is being able to take with him the offshoots of the monstera.
“Pluto, Your Black Cat” recounts the demise of the narrator’s friendship with Jack, the narrator’s roommate who is obsessed with all things British. One night, the narrator and Jack encounter and adopt a stray black cat that Jack names Pluto. Sadly, Pluto dies of herpes mere days later, and they bury the cat themselves near a gingko tree in a nearby cemetery. Following Pluto's passing, the narrator and Jack begin to quarrel more often over trivialities. Jack harbors a grudge after the narrator corrects his misconception that Edgar Allen Poe was British. He exacts his revenge one night by quizzing the narrator about the nationalities of other famous figures, taunting the narrator for each incorrect answer until the narrator lashes out. The next day, the narrator wakes to find Jack and all of his belongings missing. Calling his phone leads to an automated message claiming that the number does not exist. The narrator returns to the cemetery where Pluto was buried yet cannot find the box containing the cat’s remains, calling into question whether the cat or even Jack had ever truly existed.
The seventh story, “Melon,” follows Junhee, a woman in her forties who finds herself inadvertently pregnant nearly a year into her spontaneous marriage to Jiwoon. Her husband is delighted by the news and devotes himself entirely to the wellbeing of their unborn child, much to Junhee’s irritation. As she faces the physical and emotional struggles that come with pregnancy at an advanced maternal age, Junhee begins to indulge in fantasies about the honeymoon in the Maldives she could have had if it were not for this pregnancy, which has transformed her into a version of herself that she no longer recognizes.
“9” is the story of a gambling addiction that completely ruins a family. Hyeshin and Dongjae are a married couple with a young child, Mina. Each year, they plan a trip for themselves, their married friends, and those friends’ families. One trip to a ski resort with a casino introduces Hyeshin to the world of games of chance. She begins to frequent casinos so often that she eventually moves into a motel near one. She fuels her gambling addiction with previous earnings and, increasingly, money borrowed from Dongjae, who is threatening a divorce if she doesn’t quit and seek treatment soon. Believing that she cannot return home until she has earned a decent profit, Hyeshin continues to be a fixture at the casino, enabled by fellow gambler Sora, a graduate student who skips out on her classes to play. As Hyeshin gambles away her money and her marriage and becomes more deeply invested in her relationship with Sora, she comes to lose everything, including her sense of self.
“Home” follows a couple who set out on a long-term trip to escape from the conditions of their lives in Korea, including debt and poverty. As they travel to one foreign city after another with no plan or set destination, the narrator’s lavish spending, as though each day could be her last, worries her partner Jin. In the end, the narrator sets off on her own, leaving Jin with enough money to return to Korea, which he still considers home, and put down a deposit on a new apartment. The narrator continues on her travels and comes at last to a wintry country famed for its saunas. In the end, the narrator lies on a sheet of ice and imagines that when it breaks, she will be plunged into the depths of the ocean, where she will be free from the mold-infested houses and debt-saddled family that had defined her life in Korea. She believes that only there will she find her own home at last.
The collection closes with “Body and Light,” which is narrated by the ghost of Juhee, a young woman who dies after being hit by a one-ton truck. While eyewitness accounts and Juhee’s own distorted memories of the incident offer no consensus regarding whether Juhee died by suicide, her ghost becomes fixated on the driver of the truck that killed her, and she takes to haunting him. She discovers that the driver lives with a woman who is not Korean in a house occupied by another ghost who introduces himself as Moonsoo. Though he attempts to communicate the circumstances of his own death and his relationship to the driver and the foreign woman, death has reduced his speech to seemingly nonsensical phrases that Juhee cannot decipher. As her own ghostly form quickly changes, Juhee senses that she is losing more of her memory and speech by the minute. The story ends with a litany of images as Juhee’s ghost becomes incoherent and realizes that this is what it means to understand death.
With introspective prose colored by moments of wry humor and relatability, Wi Soo Jung captivates in this, her second full-length collection. Fans of Ha Seong-nan’s eerie, pensive short stories (Flowers of Mold, Bluebeard’s First Wife, etc.) as translated by Janet Hong, as well as readers who appreciate the spare, ominous writing of writers such as Laura van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, The Third Hotel, etc.) and Yoko Ogawa as translated by Stephen Snyder (The Memory Police, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, etc.) will delight in Wi’s subdued and sublime storytelling in a collection that invites readers to question what is real and true at every turn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wi Soo Jung made her literary debut by winning the 2017 Dong-A Ilbo New Writer’s Award with her novella, The Grave, Little by Little. She is the author of the short story collections A World of Silver and No Night for Us.
Author Bio 작가 소개
Wi Soo Jung debuted in 2017 when her short story, “The Grave, Little by Little,” won the Dong-A Ilbo’s New Writer’s Award. Her publications include the short story collection A World of Silver, which contains the story “Landscapes and Love” that is featured here.
There are no expectations.