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[ENGLISH] Everything Comes to This Shop for a Reason scrap
by Tobias Carroll
June 9, 2026
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A Midnight Pastry Shop Called Hwawoldang
In Lee Onhwa’s A Midnight Pastry Shop Called Hwawoldang, Yeon-hwa is a solitary woman with few familial connections. When her grandmother passes away, leaving her a late-night pastry shop to run, her friend Yi-ryeong observes that she doesn’t seem terribly brokenhearted by the death of her only remaining relative. Yeon-hwa tersely comments: “The tears just never came—but not because I wasn’t sad.”
The premise of this book feels like something out of a rom-com movie: a young protagonist who feels like an outsider begins running an eccentric business, while encountering a mysterious stranger along the way. That’s Sa-wol, a shaman who is a few years Yeon-hwa’s senior and who supplies her with tips in running the shop. We might be tempted to predict some formulaic outcomes. Will the family business Yeon-hwa inherits turn out to have debts, forcing her to focus all of her energy on it immediately? Will her grandmother turn out to have had secrets of her own? And will the shop’s clientele wind up charming Yeon-hwa, instilling in her an appreciation for the culinary arts? Yes, yes, and yes.
But there’s also something a little more complex happening here. Early on, Yeon-hwa learns that her grandmother kept the shop open late at night rather than during the day for a good reason: some, though not all, of the customers who visit Hwawoldang are dead. They share memories of their past lives with Yeon-hwa and make a request: a sweet pastry to taste before moving on to the process of reincarnation.
This mechanism adds a melancholic aspect to the novel, which the individual stories told by the dead magnify. For starters, most of the spirits Yeon-hwa encounters passed away at a relatively young age. They all died before the age of fifty; some died at a significantly younger age. Lee does not linger over the deaths of the characters, but their demises still sting. Many died abruptly and left unfinished business behind.
That unfinished business takes several forms. For instance, a lonely man pines for the woman he was unable to go on a first date with; a mother dies before she gets to see her daughter happily married. It’s no coincidence that Yeon-hwa is relatively isolated when we first meet her. Readers learn that her parents died when she was a child. A Midnight Pastry Shop Called Hwawoldang is not heavy-handed with the spirits’ parallels to Yeon-hwa’s life, but there are some clear ties there. Most of all, there is an emphasis on the importance of interpersonal connections, whether they be between friends, family, or romantic partners.
There’s also a larger thematic thread present throughout the novel. Early in the novel, in one of the flashbacks to the lives of the dead souls Yeon-hwa encounters, a daughter is described as “the world’s only translator for her mother’s own brand of language.” The work that Yeon-hwa and her new acquaintance Sa-wol are engaged in is not about saving the world, and the dead people they encounter are not heroes or villains. Instead, their lives are thoroughly quotidian. Yet there’s a humanism underlying these interactions: all of these lives are unique; everyone’s life has meaning and purpose. After she has taken on the responsibility of keeping Hwawoldang running, Yeon-hwa learns that spirits have a window of time to sample one of her offerings before they are forced to become “wandering souls, never to find a new life.” To wander endlessly and intangibly is an unsettling concept all its own. Yet in this book, reincarnation offers the prospect of resuming interpersonal connections.
As befits a novel set in a pastry shop, this book is attuned to the small details of food preparation. This aspect also ties the novel back to its broader themes: one of the pleasures of being alive, after all, is to experience food. In a few passages, Lee points to some international elements in Hwawoldang—Japanese crackers, Chinese characters in a sign on the shop’s wall—that suggest a broader stage for these ruminations on life, death, and sensory pleasures. The recipes Yeon-hwa learns to make are highly specific, but the lessons of embracing life are far more universal.
Writer 필자 소개
Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll is a literary critic and the author of five books, most recently the novel In the Sight. He writes a monthly column on books in translation for Words Without Borders.
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