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[ENGLISH] If Anyone Could Kill scrap
by
Luisa Hae Yoon Kim
September 7, 2026
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Mrs. Shim Is a Killer
Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, translated by Paige Morris, follows Shim Eunok, an unassuming middle-aged ajumma who becomes a contract killer for the Smile Detective Agency to save her family from debt. The story operates in a lawless underworld befitting a crime novel, populated by desperate inhabitants driven beyond the edges of respectable society. Yet Kang renders this underworld not through grim realism, but an offbeat, farcical, and fast-moving narrative style whose violence is as comic as it is disturbing.
Mrs. Shim enters with her handwritten resume, oblivious to the true nature of the position she is applying for. Wielding a chef’s knife, she saws into the air as though slicing a “well-aged rack of beef,” successfully completing the job interview by drawing on the expertise she acquired as a local supermarket butcher. Park Taesang, the Agency boss, is transfixed. He, too, learned to handle knives from his father who ran a sashimi restaurant by the sea.
Such whimsical details lend the novel a certain animal sensibility, collapsing the presumed distance between the everyday and exceptional violence. In a chapter entitled “The Killer,” a chopstick assassin also works as a chicken sexer, taking pleasure in being a “cold-blooded arbiter” of the chicks’ fates. This visceral authority affords the assassin a minor victory in a society that otherwise seeks to obscure the little power she holds, and her pleasure resembles the apprehensive thrill Mrs. Shim experiences upon carrying out her first kill. These animal instances move beyond primitive bloodlust, gesturing to something more fundamental: the human desire to matter, to be seen, remains inseparable from the exhilarating experience of transgression.
The book’s characters are hardly virtuous; fraudsters, mercenaries, and manipulators continually devise schemes for making quick money. Human desire, however, is never innocent; as the characters’ complex and compromising histories gradually come into view, Kang allows them to dwell at the edges of familiar moral taxonomies, unsettling the age-old fiction of good and evil, of villain and victim. This approach is reinforced by the novel’s episodic structure. Each chapter is titled after a different narrator—“The Shaman,” “The Secret Agent,” or “The Confidant”—as though mimicking modern society’s tendency to quantify a life into its social function. Each story, however, unveils the past behind that role, undoing the ostensible certainty of identity. Mr. Park once cherished the modest dream of becoming a CEO who also writes poems, but a disastrous romance with the sashimi restaurant’s daughter draws him into the murder-for-hire business. His star apprentice, Joongi, comes to Seoul not for a job, but in search of his emotionally distant mother. As the characters come into being with every chapter, relationships accumulate, converge, and become entangled through an undoing—an undoing into the past that humanizes these unruly people who had to sin to survive.
The novel’s enmeshed lives evoke the wave of Korean crime-noir films of the early 2000s, which popularized tropes of gangster romance, tragic twists, and sentimental criminals. Kang, however, places the disarming ajumma at the center of this masculine genre. When she isn’t out to kill, Mrs. Shim is a caring mother and a friendly neighbor who brings banchan to an elderly woman with dementia. While her prescriptive identity becomes her greatest camouflage, the anonymity of her double life does not last. As the plot develops, the rival Happy Detective Agency begins investigating the mysterious new killer, and the ensuing turf war soon places Mrs. Shim’s children in danger. The novel’s escalating conflict establishes the propulsive momentum of a crime thriller, while its shifting narrators reveal how a web of scattered personal histories—misplaced love, a fateful guess, or sheer bad luck—converge to form an entire universe.
With its rousing imagination and adrenaline-fueled rhythm, Mrs. Shim Is a Killer overturns the familiar claim that life is a sum of the choices we make. Choice is no self-contained act, but a strange amalgam of unforeseen events, serendipitous encounters, and unreasoned forces that intrude upon a life from beyond the limits of intention. Kang embraces a profusion of narrative: those bizarre, obscene, and endlessly diverging experiences that make up human existence.
We are often told to believe that our realities can be chosen, that the good life is achievable through sovereign decisions of private sacrifice and quiet endurance. Yet the novel’s eccentric and comically impulsive characters leave behind a different impression: perhaps life is a sum of contingencies, improbable and capricious. Sometimes, life simply happens in a certain way. If that is the case, why not welcome what is to come with a smile?
Writer 필자 소개
Luisa Hae Yoon Kim
Luisa Hae Yoon Kim is a researcher, writer, and translator. Her research focuses on literary criticism, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and gender and sexuality.
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